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The

CIENT CHURCH
MODERN INDIA

GODFREY E. PHILLIPS

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128

H5P4

1920

c. 1

ROBA

Trice 2/6 net

otuuent Christian Movement

Presented to the

LIBRARY of the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

TRINITY COLLEGE

The George A. Warburton
Memorial Collection

Presented to

The Canadian School of Missions
by A. A. Hvde, Esq., Wichita, Kansas.

THE ANCIENT CHURCH AND MODERN
INDIA.

The

ANCIENT CHURCH
& MODERN INDIA

GODFREY E. PHILLIPS, M.A.,

United Theological College, Bangalore,
Mthor of "The Outcasfes* Hope."

LONDON:

STUDENT CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT

32, RUSSELL SQUARE, W.C.i

1920

FIRST PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1920.

'> Jbt 1 8

-L. '

CONTENTS.

PAGE

FOREWORD vii

PREFACE xi

CHAPTER I

THE WORLD AROUND THE CHURCH, THEN AND

NOW i

1. ANCIENT ROMAN AND MODERN BRITISH ADMINISTRATION i

2. ANCIENT GREEK AND MODERN WESTERN CULTURE 3

3. ORIENTAL CONCEPTIONS, THEN AND Now ... 8

4. INFLUENCES FOR MONOTHEISM, THEN AND Now - - 10

5. REFLECTIONS ON THESE PARALLELS 12

CHAPTER II

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD OF CHURCH HISTORY, OR

THE APOSTOLIC AGE 14

1. OUR ATTITUDE TO THE APOSTOLIC AGE - - - 14

2. A PRIMITIVE CHURCH MEETING 15

3. THE PASSION FOR UNITY 18

(a) Local Unity — (b) Unity of the Church Universal —
(c) Nationality and Catholicity — (d) Economics and
Church Unity.

4. THE POSITION OF THE APOSTLES - - - - 24

5. BEGINNINGS OF ORGANIZATION - - - - 26

6. THE CASTE QUESTION 28

CHAPTER III
CHRISTIANITY AND ORIENTAL THOUGHT, OR THE

ENCOUNTER WITH GNOSTICISM -
i. THE TENDENCY_TO ECLECTICISM, THEN AND Now
?. GNOSIS OR GNANAM

3. THREE GNOSTIC TYPES

(a) The Magical — (b) The Syrian — (c) The Greek

4. MARCION

32
32
34
36

5. THE REAL DANGER

6. RESULTS OF THE STRUGGLE : THEIR VALUE FOR INDIA - 42

CHAPTER IV

THE CHRISTIAN ARGUMENT - - - - . - 44

i. THE ARGUMENT WITH JEWS THEN AND MOHAMMEDANS

NOW 44

vi Contents

2. THE ARGUMENT WITH THE GENERAL PUBLIC, THEN AND

Now 50

3. A DETAILED DEFENCE OF CHRISTIANITY (Origen against

Celsus) - 56

4. Two ATTITUDES TO PRE-CHRISTIAN THOUGHT (Clement

and Tertullian) 65

CHAPTER V

SUFFERING FOR CHRIST 73

1. THE CROSS OF PERPETUAL INSECURITY - - - - 73

2. TYPICAL SCENES -------- 74

(a) Bithynia — (b) Ignatius' journey — (c) Lyons and Vienne.

3. FAILURES OF COURAGE -------78

4. IMPRESSIONS UPON NON-CHRISTIANS - - - - 79

5. THE FINAL VICTORY - 80

6. SUFFERING FOR CHRIST IN INDIA - - - - - 81

CHAPTER VI

GLIMPSES OF EARLY CHRISTIAN LIFE ... 84
T. EARLY CHRISTIAN BHAKTI (The Odes of Solomon) - - 84

2. CARE FOR DISTANT CHURCHES (Epistle of Clement to the

Corinthians) - - - - - - - - 87

3. THE COMMONPLACE MAN WHO BECAME A PROPHET (Hernias) 90

4. CHRISTIANS AS THE SOUL OF THE WORLD (Ep. to Diognetus) 92

5. THE RECONCILIATION OF FAITH AND CULTURE (Clement of

Alexandria) --------94

6. THE VAKIL WHO PLEADED FOR CHRISTIANITY (Tertullian) 98

7. THE ASCETIC AND THEOLOGIAN (Origen) - 103

CHAPTER VII

SOCIAL EFFECTS OF CHRISTIANITY, THEN AND NOW 106

1. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND POVERTY - 107

2. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND PUBLIC DISTRESS - - 112

3. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND SLAVERY - - - - 113

4. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND THE STATUS OF WOMAN - 115

5. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND FAMILY LIFE - - - 117

6. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND PUBLIC LEGISLATION - - 121

CHAPTER VIII

DEBATED PRACTICAL QUESTIONS - - - - 124

1. NAMES OF CHRISTIANS 124

2. MIXED MARRIAGES - - - - - - -127

3. CHURCH BUILDINGS - - - - - - -130

4. THE IMPORTANCE OF TERMS - - - - - -132

5. NATURALIZING CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA - 136

FOREWORD.

1HAIL this book with joy, and warmly com
mend it to others. It has long been a favour
ite idea with me that one of the chief aids to a real
reading of ancient Christian history is to be found
in the analogies afforded by the modern Mission
field. Particularly is this true of lands like India
and China, where age-long civilizations preoccupy
the minds of men and determine the way in which
they think and feel about the Christian Gospel when
it appears in their midst. And most of all is it true
of India, where various forms and strata of civiliza
tion and thought coexist side by side in the great
" complex " called Hinduism, let alone the immi
grant elements within the total life of India,
Parseeism and Islam. These have indeed found a
settled place in Indian society, yet as special com
munities or human enclaves, rather than as leaven
ing elements in Hinduism, the native system of
society south of the Himalayas.

The parallels, then, between India, especially as
part of the British Empire or Commonwealth of
peoples, and the Roman Empire, particularly its
Oriental half— East of Italy— considered as spheres
(or the Gospel of Christ in which to develop its
inherent vital energies both as seed and as leaven,
are many, striking, and often essential. As such,

Vll

viii Foreword

these parallels are light-bringing examples and no
mere curious cases, interesting to the learned, but of
little or no real meaning and practical value. On
the contrary they are of profound human signifi
cance and guidance to right thinking and practice,
both in relation to the historic Past and to the Pre
sent, which is history in the making. This holds
good for Christians in Western lands, who have need
to understand the true historic meaning of the im
memorial traditions which mould their lives, too
often as mere tradition and custom, in order that they
may grasp and use them as spirit rather than as
letter. But it applies still more to Christians in
India, both missionaries and Indians, and to non-
Christians too, who are wishful to apprehend aright
what is going on under their eyes, as the mind of
Christ works once more, as seed and leaven, in a
soil and in a mass of humanity hitherto untouched
by its distinctive and historic forms of appeal. As
it there works, by selective affinity and repulsion,
the actual soul of man again reveals itself, as it did
in Tertullian's day in North Africa, as partly Chris
tian and partly non-Christian, the former at its
deeper and more essential levels, the latter nearer
the surface, where the inherited, local, and accidental
elements in human life hold sway. So was it dur
ing the great and long-drawn conflict of Christianity
and its religious and moral rivals in the Roman
Empire : so is it to-day to the eye of the instructed
and sympathetic observer both of Christianity and
of its organized rivals in India. And in this book
we have, reflected in a mirror of singular sympathy

Foreword ix

and sincerity, something of the impression which
familiarity alike with the great missionary stage of
ancient Christianity and with Christianity to-day as
a missionary religion in India naturally produces
on a thoughtful mind.

The result seems to me of high value for Indians,
for whom it was primarily written, being in fact the
substance of the sort of teaching the writer is wont to
give to Indian theological students in the United
Theological College at Bangalore. It is, I am sure,
a picture highly instructive and suggestive to Eng
lish men and women, particularly for those who have
any thought of serving Christ in India, whether
directly or indirectly, by personal service there or by
support at the home base.

Some parts of the ground here covered in brief
but clear outline have been dealt with more fully
elsewhere, notably by Dr. J. N. Farquhar* as regards
the realm of religious thought, while one large and
important practical aspect of the immense field has
been studied more at large by Mr. Phillips himself iri
The Outcastes' Hope (published by the United Coun
cil for Missionary Education). But I am not aware of
any other book which sets out to do what this little
series of essays (for such it really is) attempts, and
in my opinion achieves in the main, namely, to pre
sent in broad but essentially just outline and per
spective the characteristic genius of the Christian
Gospel of Life Divine in the human soul, both in
dividually and socially. Accordingly, I feel it a
deep satisfaction to be allowed to commend it to the

* The Crown of Hinduism ; Modern Religious Movements in India.

x Foreword

attention of the youth, in particular, both of India
and of English-speaking lands, as a picture loyal in
intention to truth as such, wherever found, com
petent in its knowledge of the essential facts, gracious
in spirit to all men and their cherished convictions,
and therefore entitled to be read with respect and
attention as the best thing of its kind at present
within reach anywhere. It is largely a pioneer
effort. May it have not only many readers, but also
imitators, who, working in like spirit, may add to
and supplement it in that wherein it is, and inevitably
must be, inadequate.

VERNON BARTLET.

PREFACE.

THIS little book does not aim at telling the
whole story of the ancient Christian Church.
Some day that whole story ought to be told from
the point of view of Christians in India. For
undoubtedly in India, as in all other countries, the
whole experience of the past can be made to enrich
the life of the present. Meanwhile until such
Church history for India can be written we have for
our use the great Church Histories written by
scholars in Europe and America. Here we try to
garner a few sheaves, to state a few of the most con
spicuous lessons which Christians in India to-day
can learn from the experience of the Ancient Church.
We write only as much history as is necessary to
make clear its application to modern India. This
book makes no original contribution to the story of
the past, except in so far as it shows that story in
some measure repeating itself in the present. Several
large fields of ancient Church history it leaves
entirely untouched, because it aims simply at indicat
ing in a small compass as much practical guidance as
it can on some of the weightiest problems confront
ing the Church of Christ in India in the present
generation. Inevitably it touches here and there
matters of present controversy, because all the

Xll

Pref.

ace

weightiest problems are in some measure contro
versial, but it is not written in the interests of any
particular section of the Christian Church.

A plant is infinitely more complex than its seed,
though latent in that seed there was all the poten
tiality of the roots and leaves and blossoms that
were to come. Primitive Christianity was a seed,
sown into a particular soil, and from that seed com
bining with that soil have grown many things which
in early days could not have been foreseen. The
value of Church history lies herein, that by it we
can so trace the whole development as to see both
what was true growth out of the ancient seed and
what was incongruous and unnatural fungus or
parasite. If someone showed you a poisonous fruit
on a mango tree you might be unable to tell whether
the fruit was a true mango or not, but if you have
watched mangoes grow, and have studied the origin
of their different varieties, if you know which kind
of soil fosters their best growth and which will turn
them into something dangerous to life, then you
need not be afraid. So in modern Church life there
are customs and institutions which, like a good
mango tree, are true developments from the ancient
seed, and others like the poisonous mango, false and
perverted developments. It is by the right kind of
study of Church history that we can see where the
wrong kind of sap entered in and development went
astray. So we can know which things in our modern
religious organizations cry out for reform and which
deserve our fullest support. We need to be able
to value with discrimination and sympathy the

Preface xiii

various complex elements which go to make up
modern Church life. Christianity in India and
Ceylon is not going to be an exact reproduction of
Christianity in England or America or Rome. ^ It
will inevitably develop new forms of life differing
in important ways from those of the western world.
How shall we feel safe when these new forms give
rise to problems which our experience in the present
day gives us no materials for deciding? The
answer is that probably the materials are all stored
away in the history of the past. History has a
wonderful way of repeating itself, always with fresh
minor features. Some of the forces which power
fully acted upon the Church in ancient Alexandria
or Antioch or Rome are present to-day in Colombo,
Madras, and innumerable Indian villages. In
Alexandria in the early Christian centuries the
Church was in close contact with men whose system
of thought and life bears a wonderfully close resem
blance to our Vedantism. In Antioch there were
schools like the modern Unitarians or the Brahmo-
Samaj. Consequently the problems which are raised
by everyday work in missions and Churches are often
by no means new, and light can be thrown on them
by the study of Church developments in the past.

In short, the Church has in the past had to buy
its experience at great price, and we shall pay that
price over again by the repetition of ancient mis
takes if we do not reflect upon the lessons treasured
up for us in the story of the Church's beginnings.

In the preparation of this book help has been
drawn from many sources, of which it seems

xiv Preface

unnecessary to make detailed acknowledgment. But
readers who are familiar with Dr. T. R. Glover's
Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire,
and the late Professor Gwatkin's Early Church
History, will notice the special debt to those most
valuable books. Dr. J. V. Bartlet has given much
encouragement, made most valuable suggestions,
read the manuscript, and contributed an introduc
tion, for all of which I am most grateful. The
book would not have been written at all but for my
wife, who persuaded me to get it done in the inter
vals of travel on furlough, did all the mechanical
part of the work herself, and shared in other parts
of the work besides. We desire to offer it, in
reverence and with a due sense of its shortcomings,
to the great Church of Christ in India, among whose
devoted servants we seek to find a place.

G. E. PHILLIPS.
London,

August, 1920,

The Ancient Church and
• Modern India

CHAPTER I.

THE WORLD AROUND THE CHURCH, THEN AND NOW.

i. Ancient Roman and Modern British Administra
tion.

IN the earliest days of our era the Romans were
under the impression that they ruled the world.
" There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus
that all the world should be taxed " (Luke ii. i).
With regard to the world which they knew the im
pression was approximately true, for our great
Eastern lands were so far away as to be almost for
gotten. The Roman Empire included everything
between the Euphrates, the Danube, the Rhine, the
Atlantic, and the Northern edge of the African
Desert. Cohorts of Roman soldiers could be met
everywhere, far down by the cataracts of the Nile,
or marching through the savage island of Great
Britain. We have no reliable information as to the
population of that great empire, but experts have
made estimates varying between eighty and a hun
dred millions. So in attempting the evangelization

2 The Ancient Church and Modern India

of India, Christianity has undertaken a numerically
much larger task than it faced when St. Paul set out
to win the Roman Empire.

The peoples forming the Roman Empire were of
very different nationalities, languages, and customs,
but were all held together by one strong central
government, with one system of administration.
Wherever the Roman Empire went it laid down
good roads, some of which have been maintained
and are as good to-day as when they were first made.
It became comparatively easy and safe to travel. An
inscription on a Phrygian merchant's grave shows
that he had made the journey between Phrygia and
Rome seventy-two times. Commercial enterprises
linked country with country. News spread fast, and
literature in the shape of manuscripts copied by
skilled slaves was widely circulated. The result of
all this was that that part of humanity which lay
around the Mediterranean Sea became remarkably
mingled and unified. The same process was going
on which to-day is being repeated on a larger scale
throughout the whole world, the process of drawing
the ends of the earth closer together and making
intercourse between the different sections of
humanity far more frequent and effective in its in
fluence upon common life. Men began to feel
themselves to be citizens not onlv of their own city
or country but of the whole world. Rome not only
provided what was on the whole the best govern
ment which the world had hitherto seen, but she
finally (early in the third century) expended the
privileges of her citizenship to all the countries which

The World Around the Church 3

she conquered. The result was manifest in the
growth of a larger patriotism which made the Gaul,
the Spaniard, the Syrian, proud to call himself
" Roman."

It is clear that for India in the present
century the British Government has performed the
same sort of function as Rome performed in the first
two centuries of our era for the peoples around the
Mediterranean Sea. India's many peoples, speaking
one hundred and twenty-seven distinct languages,
now feel themselves to be unquestionably one.
Roads, commerce, methods of administration, and
unity of official language, under an administration
which, whatever criticisms may justly be levelled at
its detailed acts, aims in general at justice and pro
gress, all these things have opened up marvellous
possibilities for the unified India of to-day. A re
ligion whose ideals captured the imagination and
won the whole-hearted allegiance of any consider
able part of Indian society to-day would in a very
short time permeate the whole life of the new India
which is coming into being.

2. Ancient Greek and modern Western culture.

In the days of St. Paul Rome was the world's
ruler; yet if you had walked any day even into Rome
itself, as you passed a group of aristocratic young
gentlemen laughing together in the Forum, you
would have heard the Greek language. That was
a symptom of the next great general influence per
vading the world. The Greeks had failed to build
up a Greek nation, but had succeeded in imposing

4 The Ancient Church and Modern India

on the whole educated world their ideas, their beliefs,
and their language. The best poems, the best
statues, the best philosophies, all were Greek, and
everyone knew it and tried to imitate them. One
thing that helped in this process was that Greeks,
like modern Scotchmen, were to be found every
where. After Alexander's conquests opened up the
East and Roman rule settled the West, Greeks
scattered everywhere as artists, as merchants, and as
teachers of philosophy. It says much for their in
tellectual power that the whole educated world began
to talk their language. In the book of the Acts we
see St. Paul preaching throughout most of the
Roman Empire, but never faced with the modern
missionary's task of learning a new language. Where-
ever he went he preached in Greek and was well
understood. Only once, in the Lycaonian Hills
(Acts xiv. n), did a difference of language cause
him any difficulty. The official language of Govern
ment and the Courts was Latin; but the one com
mon language of the Empire was Greek.

A modern European missionary spends years in
learning a language like Tamil, and then is dumb
in the villages a hundred miles north of Madras.
He has one consolation — he can speak in English
to audiences in any city throughout India. When
English spreads throughout the villages, as it has
already done in the cities, we shall have a good
parallel to the spread of Greek in the first century.

There is one fact here well worth noting. It was
only during the centuries when Christianity was
spreading over the whole Empire that Greek was in

The World Around the Church 5

universal use. By the third century Rome talked
little Greek, and by the fourth it was purely a Latin
city again. Are we not obliged to say that God
used the Greek language as one powerful help to
the spread of the Gospel; and is it not certain that
the English language in India can help to serve a
similar purpose?

The Greek language inevitably carried with it
Greek ideas, which as inevitably affected men's
religious beliefs. We like to know not only what
great writers thought, but what ordinary men in
city and village believed. From the practical point
of view to-day the beliefs of Ramaswami matter
more in the village than the religion of the Rig
Veda; and the case was the same with the Graeco-
Roman Empire. There is plenty of evidence that
the religion of the uneducated majority of the popu
lation was wonderfully like the popular religion of
villagers in India or Ceylon to-day. Have we
thirty-three crores of deities in India? A Greek
poet once wrote that the air was so full of deities
that there was no room to put in the spike of an ear
of corn without touching one. Our village religion
has nothing to do with conscience, nor had theirs.
Have we a deity whose help the thief solicits before
he steals? They had Cloacina. Have we gods or
demons for every kind of lust, for every kind of
disease, for protection of crops, or for the molesta
tion of unwary men? They had them all, with
different names. Have we trees, wells, and stones
which ^ods are said to inhabit? They had them
all. The villager in Italy at the time when Paul

6 The Ancient Church and Modern India

was in Rome had the same reasons to be nervous
about going out at nights as has the villager in
Ceylon to-day. Perhaps the house which Paul
rented had, as most Roman houses had, a little room
set apart for family gods, the Lares, little stone
figures sometimes in the form of a snake, sometimes
in the shape of a young man, all black from being
constantly anointed in worship. Such a room must
have looked exactly like the puja room in Hindu
houses to-day. Outside the house in ancient Italy,
just as in modern India, were sacred stones to which
the mother of the house would pray to cure her child
of fever. Ancestor worship played almost as
prominent a part in the religion of Rome as in the
religion of India. Terrible consequences would
result if spirits of deceased fathers were not fed by
their eldest sons. The grief felt by a Hindu father
who has no heir to perform his sraddha ceremony,
or whose heir has become a Christian, was felt in
exactly the same way and for exactly the same
reasons by any Roman father in similar case. The
prevailing popular religion had all the usual features
and all the undesirable effects of animism. Fauns
and satyrs now are mythical beings which can be
prettily mentioned in poems. But once the common
people believed in them and were very much afraid.
All unity or meaning in life disappears when it is
overshadowed by a multitude of incalculable, caprici
ous, supernatural beings. For the common man no
advance in knowledg-e, civilization, or religion was
possible until the popular polytheism had been under
mined.

The World Around the Church 7

But for vast numbers of the educated it had been
undermined by Greek thought, in the same way as
village paganism in India has been largely under
mined by Western education. Plato had dreamed
of a great god enthroned like the one sun in the
heavens, and the man who had caught that vision
could never rest content with his crowd of godlings.
Other Greeks were sceptics, and their ideas dissolved
men's fear of a god in the tree or stone. Not that
they wished to enlighten the common people. The
terrors of religion were useful, they thought, for
keeping the vulgar multitude in order. Recall the
pictures of the tortures of evil-doers in the future
world to be seen alike in Buddhist temples and on
some old stained-glass windows in Christian
churches. These things are supposed to keep in
check the lawless and ignorant, but enlightened men
scarcely take them seriously. That was precisely
the attitude toward religion of most of the men who
had passed through some school of Greek philosophy.
And yet in spite of the enlightenment, superstition
flourished, and polytheistic practice often enough
accompanied a theoretic belief in the existence of
one God or a denial of any god. " After all there
might be something in it," thought clever men when
they began to consider the abandoning of some hoary
rite. Their women liked the superstition and took
it seriously, and doubtless sometimes the women
served the men as an excuse. A young student of
Calcutta university may talk like Herbert Spencer
at the college debates, but the religious practices
in his house continue as before. Moreover, then

8 The Ancient Church and Modern India

as now, there was no lack of people who could find
a mystical or allegorical or pseudo-scientific reason
for everything old or strange.

Some of the religious processions in the streets
on holy days must have looked much like those with
which we are familiar : for the idol in its best clothes
was carried through the streets with beat of drum
and blast of horn, and crowds of attendant priests.
Away in the temple were the vestal virgins, the
devadasis of their time. It was all a strange medley
of wisdom and folly, of theoretic enlightenment
alongside of practical superstition, and it could not
satisfy the best longings of human hearts. So they
began increasingly to turn towards forms of religion
that came from the East.

3. Oriental Conceptions, Then and Now.

When men felt the desire for something purer
than the life they knew, or when the death of loved
ones made them look wistfully towards a life beyond
the grave, the old Roman or Greek religions had
nothing to say. So they began to turn to foreign
deities, from Phrygia, from Egypt, from Persia —
gods that promised some kind of salvation to the
individual soul. Terrible rites were done in honour
of Cybele, " The great Mother," with frenzied
scenes of what we should call devil-dancing, accom
panied by blood-shedding and horrible self-mutila
tion. There was the gentler worship of Isis, who
helped women in childbirth, and told of future
happenings. There were the rites of Mithras,
whose name comes from India, as the twin-god of

The World Around the Church 9

Varuna, but who in the course of evolution had
become the sun-god, the soldier's special deity, who
required from his devotees moral as well as cere
monial purification. All these were religions not
for a single nation, but for men as men. All of them
offered some kind of salvation from the ills and
sorrows of this present life, which the paganism of
Greece and Rome never attempted to give. As
missionary religions they were Christianity's most
formidable rivals; and the ordinary observer in the
second century would have found it difficult to
prophesy which, if any, of all these religions would
capture the whole Empire's allegiance. Christianity
won the victory, but the other faiths left their mark
upon it. They taught Christians to glorify
asceticism. They laid an emphasis on individual
salvation which sometimes detached men too com
pletely from the family and the state. And some
scholars think that it was one of these religions, the
Egyptian, which passed on to the Catholic Church
the custom of placing in the religious foreground
that picture of the mother and child which has ever
since been one of the most prominent features of
Christianity in the Orthodox and Roman Churches.
The Madonna and Child may be perhaps just Isis
and Horus Christianized. This influx of foreign
religions is often called by historians the influx of
" orientalism," for it meant the spirit of the East
pervading the West. The East here alluded to
probably did not go much further than the Euphrates,
unlike the East of our day which is commonly con
sidered to begin at the Suez Canal and end perhaps

io The Ancient Church and Modern India

with Japan. But when we look at the thoughts
which then came from the East, they bear an unmis
takable family likeness to ideas still prevalent
throughout India. As yet there is no available
evidence to prove a direct connection between India
and the oriental teachings of the second and third
centuries. But there was certainly intercourse with
India, and the resemblance of the ideas is so close
that those who are most familiar with characteristic
Indian views of life will easily believe that India
contributed something to the thoughts of many
circles in the Roman Empire in the early centuries
of our era. So it may be not for the first time that
now in India Christianity has come into vital contact
with Indian religious and philosophical ideas.

4. Influences for Monotheism, Then and Now.

In every important city of the Roman Empire
was to be found at least one plain rectangular build
ing, often with a pole rising from the roof — the
synagogue of the Jews. Wherever Paul travelled
the Jews were settled, and it was to their synagogues
that he first directed his steps. In Egypt there are
said to have been a million Jews, and in Alexandria
two whole wards of the city were theirs, for all
practical purposes a separate Jewish town. There
were ten thousand of them in Rome, and it has been
estimated that they formed nearly seven per cent, of
the total population of the whole Empire. Now
adays the Jews number only some fifteen millions,
scattered among the vast population of the whole
earth, a much less conspicuous and influential element

The World Around the Church n

than they must have been in those early centuries.
It was not by mere birth-rate that the little nation
of Jews, from one of the smallest of the provinces,
had grown so numerous as to become seven per cent,
of the total population of the Empire. It was be
cause Judaism had become a missionary religion.
While some Jews had the kind of proselytising spirit
which our Lord rebuked (Matt, xxiii. 15), others
felt that their religion was a treasure given to them
in trust for all nations. The whole world needed
the knowledge of the one spiritual God and His
holy law, and every Nineveh should have its Jonah.
So when the Jews scattered for trade all along the
great roads, some went in the spirit of zealous mis
sionaries, and won converts among the highest as
well as among the lowest classes of society. While
there were plenty of Jewish fortune-tellers and
beggars, there was also a Jewish proselyte King of
Adiabene, and there was the Empress Poppaca,
Nero's wife. Alike among rich and poor their very
presence must have been a reminder of the belief
in one holy God, and a much more effectual reminder
than that of the enlightened Greek Platonists. For
to the Jew the oneness of God was not a theoretic
deduction from philosophical reasoning, it was the
fact at the root of all things. The Jewish syna
gogues, as is shown in the Book of Acts, became
great centres of hostility to Christianity, yet as wit
nesses to monotheism all over the Empire they were
a most valuable preparation for the Christian pro
paganda. They formed a bridge by which the
Christian Gospel rapidly passed over into the pagan

12 The Ancient Church and Modern India

world. Stephen, as later St. Paul, is a clear illus
tration. He was a Jew of the Dispersion, and he
laid down his life to show the universal implications
in both Judaism and Christianity.

Instead of the Jews we have the Mohammedans,
Semitic monotheists like the Jews, forming more
than one-fifth of the population. Jews and
Mohammedans have much in common, not least their
fierce resistance to Christianity as a kind of treachery
to the unity of God. But just as the Jews who
hated Christianity, nevertheless by their preaching
about God prepared the way for it, so we may surely
say that the presence of sixty-six million Mohamme
dans among a people 'given over to polytheism has
kept alive the thought of the oneness of God, pro
claiming one element in His being which Christianity
endorses and vitally supplements.

5. Reflections on these Parallels.

Of course there are differences, many and great,
between the situation in the ancient Roman Empire
and that which we face in modern India. But are
not the similarities sufficient to provide us with some
valuable suggestions? First, we must surely see
that as once to the Roman Empire, so now to India
and Ceylon, the religion of Christ has come " in the
fulness of time." The same Providence which made
the whole Roman Empire ready for the religion of
Christ to permeate from end to end has been watch
ing over India and Ceylon, preparing the way for
the advent of Jesus Christ among the many millions
of their peoples.

The World Ground the Church 13

Again, this backward look suggests to us encour
agement as we turn to the future. Are we con
scious of the weaknesses of our cause in face of the
vast numbers, of the strange ideas, of the whole
situation amid which it has to be promoted in our
land ? Our religion has met this kind of difficulty
before and has overcome it. We Christians in India
are only one per cent, of the population, and are
often treated as insignificant. But it was a despised
minority which spread the knowledge of Christ to
the remotest parts of the Roman Empire. The per
meation of India with the ideals of Christ is not
the dream of overwrought enthusiasts; it is some
thing shown by historical precedent to be not only
perfectly possible and practicable, but to be inevit
able if Christian people are faithful.

But, once more, it was the ordinary Jew and not
professional religious propagandists who filled the
Empire with synagogues and unconsciously prepared
the way for the teaching of Christ. It was equally
the common Christian who followed the ordinary
Jew, taking advantage of the way prepared, and
spreading everywhere the knowledge of his Master
as he went about his daily business. And in the
long run it must be the ordinary Indian Christian,
and not the specially trained exponent of Chris
tianity supported by the Churches of the West, who
will penetrate the remotest regions and spheres of
life in India with the knowledge of Christ.

CHAPTER II.

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD OF CHURCH HISTORY, OR
THE APOSTOLIC AGE.

i. Our Attitude to the Apostolic Age.

THE age of the Apostles — men who had known
Christ in the flesh, who had witnessed the
Crucifixion and the Resurrection, who were the first
to experience the amazing enhancement of human
powers by the descent of the Divine Spirit, and who
in the strength of that experience founded the first
congregations of Christian believers — such an age
must needs be the classical age of the Church, to
which more than any other we look for the best
guidance on the essentials of Church life. That
does not mean that we are to try to make some
slavish copy of it in the present day, for the condi
tions of that day cannot be repeated. We shall
not, for example, live in expectation of the im
mediate visible second coming of our Lord because
the first Christians anticipated that such an event
would take place while most of its members were
still alive. But we can see enough of the life which
animated the first Church for us to understand what
must be the most essential features in the life of the
Church in any age or country. India needs no
slavish imitation of primitive Christianity. But the

The Apostolic Age 15

Indian Church needs nothing more urgently than to
be endowed with the spirit which made the first
Church so divinely vital and powerful.

2. A Primitive Church Meeting.

Can we picture to ourselves a gathering of one of
those earliest Churches? A group of people are
met together in a house in Corinth. Many of them
are slaves. The house belongs to one of the Chris
tians and is large enough for the gathering. Three
or four weighty senior members of the Church
(elders) have arranged things and have gathered the
brethren together, but they do not conduct the
service. There is prayer by someone. Then an
Old Testament Psalm is recited in Greek, followed
by singing which may one day include the Magni
ficat or the Gloria. One person rises and tells a story
of Christ, perhaps reciting some incident from a
Gospel hitherto unknown to most or all of those
present. Feeling is being stirred; a "prophet"
rises whose face shows that he is " in the Spirit."
He speaks very solemnly, believing that he has God's
own message to communicate, and there is an atmo
sphere in which all feel that God's voice can be heard.
When he ceases another man rises, and in a voice now
low and indistinct, now loud and impassioned, gives
forth some utterance which most men cannot under
stand. He is rapt, and possibly does not even him
self know what he is saying. His voice sinks to
silence, and the man who sits next him, it may be,
rises to declare to the assembly what was the mean
ing of those incomprehensible words. Now all share

1 6 The Ancient Church and Modern India

in the exultation which the tongue-speaker had felt.
There is an interruption; a non-Christian Greek who
happened to come to the meeting, and who has been
watching all that takes place, can bear it no longer;
he falls on his face crying out that Jesus is Lord.
He came only as a spectator, but he has become a
participant. No wonder he is impressed. There is
no artificial eloquence of words in that meeting, but
there is certainly an unearthly power, to be met with
nowhere else. The presence of the Spirit is a reality
which no one in the room can doubt.

Attempts have been made in these days to revive
the practice of " speaking with tongues." When
the ordinary gatherings of the Church are too often
lifeless and dull, it is not remarkable that some
should seek to revive the emotional exhilaration of
those first days. Such must ever bear in mind that
St. Paul, who had this particular gift in special
measure, set slight store by its value to the Church,
and would rather speak five words with his under
standing than ten thousand words in a tongue. St.
Paul felt that what matters to the Church is not
visible effervescence, but the deep quickening of
inward life; not strange psychopathic manifestations,
but the less showy fruits of the Spirit. On the other
hand, those of us who are apt to be content with dead
and respectable meetings are in no better case than
those who show life in riotous emotionalism. Merely
formal " dead and alive " meetings to-day are no
truer Church meetings, in the primitive sense of the
term, than are those gatherings of the Pentecostal
League where emotion is artificially stimulated. All

The Apostolic Age 17

of us alike need to pray for that outpouring of the
Divine Spirit upon all God's people which alone con
stitutes them into a Church in the New Testament
sense of the term. The " one man worship " into
which sometimes our Sunday services degenerate,
worship in which the spirits of all but the minister
are merely passive, is untrue to type and condemned
by the example of the first Church.

Whether it showed itself in speaking with tongues
or not, the sense of the infilling of the Divine Spirit
is the characteristic note of the first Church every
where. It was by being filled with the Spirit that
a man showed himself to be a Christian. That was
what made Peter sure of Cornelius. Not only
Apostles but all Christian people felt themselves to
be in the grasp of a supernatural power, guided
hither and thither in ways impossible to unaided
human understanding, and enabled to accomplish
things impossible to ordinary human faculties. The
whole body was so pervaded by a joyous enthusiasm,
which by its works could be recognized as being the
Spirit of Christ, that it could be described as the
living body of the risen Lord; all the gifts which
any member possessed were Spirit-given, and destined
for the building up of the whole body. They might
be gifts which, like miraculous healing, or speaking
with tongues, disappeared from the Church's life
under different conditions; or they mi^ht be gifts of
administration possessed by elders or bishops, or gifts
of service, possessed by deacons; or they might be
gifts of hospitality, of sympathy, of affection for
other Christians, or magnanimity in return for evil

1 8 The Ancient Church and Modern India

(see Romans xii.). Indeed it is most noteworthy how
St. Paul lays increasing emphasis on the Spirit-gifts
of character and conduct which have their sphere in
common, everyday domestic and social intercourse —
the warp and woof of three-fourths of our conscious
life. This is the sphere of the " conscience " in its
characteristically Christian sense, in which the will
is operative in obedience to the promptings of the
Spirit of God within, revealed as the Spirit of Christ.
But whatever they were, they were in their several
ways inspired by the Spirit, poured out upon the
Church through the risen Christ. It would be futile
for us in India to imagine that we were following
the example of the first Church, if we merely copied
some of the external forms, without realizing that
the life which alone gives value to those forms is
the life of the Church, permeated through and
through, both individually and collectively, with the
life of the Divine Spirit. Life must organize its
own outward expression; and the life of the first
Church was in the fullest sense of the term Spirit-
filled.

3. The Passion for Unity.
(a) Local Unity.

It is often assumed that if Churches everywhere
were independently to follow the Spirit's guidance
there would be hopeless disorder rendering real unity
impossible. In view of this it is interesting to note
that the earliest Churches passionately exalted the
virtue of unity. Each Church was a brotherhood

The Apostolic Age 19

linked together by the most intimate of ties; the
spirit which each individual member received was
also a spirit of fellowship. Fellowship (koinonia)
became one of the great New Testament words, and
isolated Christian life was quite unknown. There
was an atmosphere of love which made each little
community an organism, feeling throughout its whole
being the sorrows or joys of particular members.
Sometimes this showed itself as an economic fellow
ship, as when lands were sold by the richer for the
benefit of the poorer brethren. In the regular
activity of the Church it was shown in, and immensely
strengthened by, the love-feast, crowned by the
Eucharist, which first united the brethren in table
fellowship, and then sanctified that fellowship by all
the hallowed associations of the Last Supper. The
Epistles of the New Testament not only abound in
exhortations to unity; all their great promises con
cerning Christian life and character are made to Chris
tians who are in fellowship one with another (see
e.g., Ephesians iii. and iv.).

We cannot get any clear picture of the early
Church without feeling by contrast the poverty of
the corporate life of our Churches in India. We live
in a caste-ridden country where divisive tendencies
are in the moral atmosphere, so that petty disputes
easily separate people into cliques, and our Churches
have suffered thereby. For that very reason it is
essential for us to seek in fuller measure that Chris
tian fellowship without which there can be no Spirit-
filled Church. It is sometimes easier to work for
schemes of union of the whole great Church of Christ
c

20 The Ancient Church and Modern India

than to manifest living spiritual fellowship with
awkward members of our own local Church. But such
schemes of union are utterly vain without that com
mon sharing of Christians in the divine Spirit of
which they should be the organized expression.
There is special value in everything which can
strengthen in our local Churches the sense of belong
ing to one body. If we need not imitate the "love-
feast " of the first Church, we do need something
equivalent, and it probably should take the form of
a common meal. There ought to be a oneness be
tween us all which is obvious to the most superficial
outside observer.

(b) Unity of the Church Universal.

There was no link of organization uniting Churches
of New Testament times with the Churches of other
provinces and countries, but only the personal link
afforded by occasional visits of Apostles or other
Christians. With no machinery of unity we might
have expected that Churches would be quite detached
from each other, which makes it the more striking
that the opposite is what occurred. Nothing is
clearer in the documents of the apostolic age than
the feeling of all Christians that the Church universal
is one. The individual local Church never forgot
the collective Church throughout all lands, of which
it felt itself to be the local representative. The
sense of the unity of the whole Church is expressed
for example in the earliest Eucharistic prayer which
has come down to us : " As this piece of bread was
once scattered (as grain) upon the top of the moun-

The Apostolic Age 21

tains, and then being gathered together became one,
so may Thy Church be gathered together from the
ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom."

Is there no suggestion here of reconciliation be
tween two schools of thought concerning Church
unity in India ? Some say, " Let each individual
congregation of Christian people manage its own
affairs— we want no great machinery or organiza
tion, which is unsuitable for India." They have put
their finger on a real truth. A unity which mainly
depended upon elaborate machinery would be of
little value, and the life of the Church universal is
of little value apart from the vigorous Spirit-filled
local fellowship of each constituent part. It is pro
bably also true that India finds more difficulties than
many other lands in the management of elaborate
machinery of organization. But those who hold
this side of the truth must not forget the other, that
catholicity was a note of all Church life in the best
period of its history. In the circumstances in which
we find ourselves in modern India, without such a
link as the first Churches possessed in a single lan
guage or in the apostolic visits, there would be grave
loss to unity unless some means were found of giving
practical embodiment to that wider unity of the
Church universal which needs to be deeply realized
by every member of each local congregation. While
the early Church precedent proves that unity is a
matter of spirit and not of organization, neverthe
less some minimum of common organization seems
to be a necessity of our time.

22 The Ancient Church and Modern India

Another consideration suggests itself in this con
nection. The wave of national feeling which has
swept over India has stirred in many hearts the desire
for a truly indigenous Church, which shall cease to
imitate Western Christianity and find characteristic
Indian expressions for all its life. That such a desire
is legitimate can hardly be doubted, whether we
study fundamental principles or historical precedent.
The Church in India must be really Indian if it is
truly alive. But our history suggests a word of
caution. There is little doubt that Church life in
Achaia worked out in forms different from those of
Church life in Judaea. " The Corinthian in Jerusalem
found himself in a society stiff, uncouth, severe,
formal, pedantic. The Jewish Christian in Corinth
must have thought the Church there given
over to unbridled license."* And yet the
Churches in both countries were in vital touch with
each other. Each faithfully remembered the other,
and was ready on occasion to minister to the other's
need. The Epistles show how much importance
St. Paul attached to the collection throughout the
Greek Churches in aid of the " Saints " who were
at Jerusalem. He regarded it as a practical expres
sion of the existing spiritual unity which mattered
so much. St. Paul was ready to fight to the death
against any attempt to impose merely Judaic forms
on a Greek Church. But he made it one of his
greatest aims to foster between Jewish and Greek
Churches the strongest possible sense of spiritual

* Missionary ^Methods, St. Paul's or Ours, by Roland Allen, p. 172.

The Apostolic Age 23

unity, and to give that unity as much outward ex
pression as he could. A Church merely Greek or
merely Judasan would have been to him unthink
able. The Church in India must be truly indigen
ous, but can never be merely national. It may and
should create specially Indian forms of life and wor
ship, but it must never lose its catholicity. The
more truly it expresses the genius of the country
for the service of Christ the better for India, but it
must never get cut off from the holy Church through
out all the world, else it will suffer in its own life
and deprive the Church Universal of the special con
tribution which Indian Christianity ought to make
to the one Body of Christ.

(d) Economics and Church Unity.

We know, unfortunately, little about the economic
condition of the members of the apostolic Churches.
Some had more than they needed of this world's
goods, but a good many New Testament references
suggest that the poor were numerous. In normal
times each local Church, however poor, supported
itself, and in some cases, such as that of the Church
at Philippi, sent occasional help to the Apostle Paul
in distant places. We have seen how at a time of
special need in the Jerusalem Churches, the Churches
in Gentile provinces joined together to send through
St. Paul a gift of money which was probably large,
and was specially valued by the Apostle as a demon
stration of the unity of Jewish and Gentile Christen
dom.

The position was the reverse of that which is so

24 The Ancient Church and Modern India

familiar to us in India, the economic dependence of
the " mission " Church upon aid from the parent
Church. Corinth received no grant from Jerusalem,
but sent money to help Jerusalem in its need.
Obviously the difference in standards of living be
tween English and Indian Churches makes a com
plication vitiating comparisons with the apostolic
Churches which might otherwise be made. It was
only right in the past that English Christians should
demonstrate their unity with Indian Christians by
helping them to support their ministry. But in these
days the economic dependence of Indian upon Eng
lish Churches is becoming increasingly undesirable
and is the regret of all true Indians. It ought to
come to an end at the earliest possible moment. The
present growth of self-support in many parts of the
Indian Church is an encouraging sign of progress.
Before long Tinnevelly, Madras, and Bombay will
be in finance as independent of Europe and America
as were Asia and Achaia of Judaea. And the day
may come when once more the unity of the Church
Universal will be demonstrated by finance, this time
by the help sent by Christians from India to their
fellow believers in the West in some great hour of
need.

4. The position of the Apostles.

One cannot study the apostolic Church without
recognizing throughout its life the apostolic influence.
The Apostles, under the leading of the Spirit, guided
all the most important developments of the Church
in their time, as was natural in the spiritual fathers

The Apostolic Age 25

of the Churches. " For though ye should have ten
thousand tutors in Christ, yet have ye not many
fathers : for in Christ Jesus I begat you through the
gospel." (i Cor. iv. 15.) Indeed it has seemed to
some at least of the most careful students of the New
Testament, such as the late Dr. Hort of Cambridge,
that the ill-defined but lofty authority which they
exerted was simply " the result of the spontaneous
homage of the Christians among whom they
laboured," and that there is " no trace of a formal
communication of authority for government from
Christ Himself."* It was inevitable that such
leadership should go along with the Apostolic func
tion of primary witness to the gospel and mind of
Christ. With very little imagination we can guess
how readily a Church of apostolic days would yield
its reverence to men as full of the Holy Spirit and of
power as the first Apostles, men, too, who had com-
panied with the Lord, and witnessed the great events
of His earthly history. A saintly pioneer Christian
founder of a modern Church, keeping in touch with
that Church throughout his life, might exert a very
similar authoritative influence as primary local wit
ness to the Gospel. But in the case of the Apostles
there was the added weight of their more direct
contact with the historical Jesus. There were other
apostles, however, besides the Twelve, such as
Paul and Barnabas, Andronicus and Junias (Rom.
xvi. 7). From St. Paul's own letters we know that
he regarded the ordinary government of a Church
as belonging to itself under the lead of the local

*Hort, Christian Ecchsia, p. 86.

26 The Ancient Church and Modern India

ministry. When a Church seemed in danger of going
wrong in some grave matter such as insistence on
circumcision, denial of the resurrection, or degrada
tion of the " Table of the Lord," St. Paul wrote in
no uncertain tones, and expected his words to have
great weight (Gal. v. i ; i Cor. xv. 14 and 15; i
Cor. xi. 1 6). But on the other hand he argued each
matter out from first principles of faith, pleading
with the Church to make the right decision for itself.
He wished them to become " full grown men in
understanding" (i Cor. xiv. 20), and so sought to
educate their spiritual insight by the means which
is needful to anything like spiritual maturity, viz.,
its responsible exercise in practice. Hence he never
issued an order that the Church was to do certain
things in blind obedience to his authority.

5. Beginnings of Organization.

All the evidence goes to show that at the time of
the Apostles the organization of the Churches was
fluid and transitional. Under the pressure of
developing requirements, guided by the constant
presence of the Spirit within, the brethren were find
ing out the best ways of meeting the needs of their
rapidly growing society. There was no ready-made
scheme of Church government delivered by Christ
to the Apostles and by the Apostles to the Church.
Followers of Him Who exalted greatness in service
above all other greatness (Mark x. 42 f.), and Who
deprecated the use of titles, " for one is your teacher
and all ye are brethren " (Matt, xxiii. 8), could
hardly begin at once to set up a hierarchy of govern-

The Apostolic Age 27

ment. Rather, in every country as need pressed,
the assembly of believers developed some kind of
Church order along the lines of its native religious
habits. The Book of Acts takes that so much as a
matter of course requiring no explanation that it
says far less about organization than we should have
expected.

There is no space here for a review of the evidence
concerning the early meanings attached to the words
" ciders or presbyters," " overseers or bishops,"
" deacons," or the subsequent evolution of the later
three-fold ministry. These are matters upon which
controversy is still going on. But enough is clear
and generally accepted by scholars to show that for
the Church of Christ in India to-day, provided it
depends fully on the leading of the indwelling Spirit,
there is on the one hand complete liberty, and on the
other an obligation from which there is no escape.
There is complete liberty to develope such forms of
Church organization as best express the life " in
Christ " for Indian Christians. There is no
authoritative historical precedent which we in India
must follow or be disloyal. On the other hand there
rests upon us the obligation to maintain touch with
the holy Church Universal, and bear that Church's
witness to the whole world outside. History
teaches us the plain duty of combining freedom with
catholicity, and of doing local service with a world
wide outlook. While we do the work for Christ
lying at our doors, the progress of the Christian
Church in China or America claims our interest, and
we are commissioned to spread the Gospel not only

28 The Ancient Church and Modern India

through India but through the whole world. There
is no more disquieting feature of the life of some of
our older Churches than their restriction of atten
tion to their own local affairs, and their inevitably
resultant failure to grow.

6. The Caste Question.

The Book of Acts is very largely the story of how
the growing religion burst one after another the bands
which tried to restrict its growth. Not only Jews
but Samaritans came to receive its benefits. Then
Peter, through the case of Cornelius, was divinely
shown that an exceptional form of Christianity was
possible even for Gentiles. But the greatest ques
tion which the new religion had to face was not
whether a few Gentiles might be acknowledged as
Christians by a Church mainly Jewish, but whether
the Church could boldly show that in Christ a new
principle of unity had been found strong enough to
bridge over the most ancient, the widest, and deepest
gulfs that separate man from man. There was no
deeper division of the ancient world than that which
separated Jew from Gentile. It was in the great
city of Antioch, where the new religion came into
contact with all forms of the civilization of the
Roman Empire, that there was first formed a com
pany of Christians who were uncircumcised, with
whom, consequently, an orthodox Jew could not eat
without shocking Jewish susceptibilities, just as those
of a Brahman are shocked by seeing a Christian con
vert from his caste freely mingling with pariahs.
The question had to be faced, " What in Christianity

The Apostolic Age 29

is essential, and what is non-essential?" and on the
answer depended the unity of the Church. No
wonder Peter and Barnabas wavered. At last a
grand conference on the subject was held at Jeru
salem, and there in the midst of the conservative
surroundings of orthodox Judaism the clear insight
of St. Paul carried the day. He had learnt in bitter
struggle of soul the powerlessness of the law, and
in the joy of deliverance had found that in Christ all
relationships were changed, all things had become
new. The elder apostles gave him their support,
and in the findings of the Jerusalem Conference
Jewish Christians voluntarily gave up in obedience
to Christian charity that which a few years before
they would have died to maintain, the old caste cus
tom which prevented Jews from eating with Gentiles.
" The Jerusalem Conference marks one of the
greatest triumphs in the moral history of humanity."'
Two principles are clearly embodied in its decisions.
(a) That which divides men by ancient custom is in
finitely less powerful than that which unites them
when both are finding their salvation in Christ.
" We shall be saved through the grace of the Lord
Jesus in like manner as they" (Acts xv. n). (b)
For the sake of mutual intercourse any one set of
Christians must be willing to abandon customs which
while harmless in themselves are unnecessary and
offensive to other Christians.

The struggle was not yet ended. Throughout
St. Paul's Epistles we notice a constant insistence
on the oneness which bridged over every gulf at

* J. V. Bartlet, in Christ and Civilization, p. 166.

30 The Ancient Church and Modern India

that time dividing humanity (Gal. iii. 28, Eph. ii.
14, etc.). St. Paul realized more clearly than anyone
else in his day that this oneness in Christ was an
essential element of the new religion.

All this has an intensely practical interest for the
Church of Christ in India. Caste is a system of
social separation not exactly like the separation be
tween Jew and Gentile, yet in its practical results
closely similar. And whether it be between Vellalas
and Panchamas in Jaffna or Tan j ore, or between
Shanars and Pulayas in Travancore, or between
Malas and Madigas in the Telugu mass movements,
or even between English and Indian Churches in
India, an amount of separation exists at present which
endangers the unity of the Church of Christ. The
principles by which the Church joined Jew and
Gentile in a higher unity are a safe guide still. Christ
is so much to the Christian that the most funda
mental worldly distinctions, even those of caste or
race, are swallowed up in a common allegiance to
Him. In Christ there can be neither caste man
nor pariah, neither white man nor coloured, neither
European nor Sinhalese nor African, but Christ is
all and in all. No Church can be permanently
strong which is not true to this fundamental prin
ciple.

At the same time the decision of the Jerusalem
Council suggests that each group of Christians must
be prepared for the sake of mutual fellowship to give
up customs which though harmless in themselves
are an unnecessary obstacle to mutual fellowship.
The Christian of low-caste origin has his sacrifices

The Apostolic Age 31

to make as well as the Christian from the higher
castes, and must be as willing to give up old customs
which seriously offend the other brethren as the
Gentile Christian had to be willing to give up the
eating of things strangled.

CHAPTER III.

CHRISTIANITY AND ORIENTAL THOUGHT, OR THE
ENCOUNTER WITH GNOSTICISM.

i. The Tendency to Eclecticism, Then and Now.

THE streams of Christian and of Indian thought
as yet have flowed in different channels, as if they
had nothing to do with each other. But they must
come together at last, and already we see frequent
attempts being made, as they must be made, to state
Christian truth in Indian religious terms. The ten
dency of our age and country is towards eclecticism,
the gathering together into a composite whole of
heterogenous elements drawn from a variety of
sources. Particularly marked is this tendency in
circles influenced by theosophy, which under the in
fluence of its tenet of "the brotherhood of religions"
tends more than other systems to draw materials from
every faith.

All eclectic systems in the long run suffer from
lack of vitality. You cannot build up a living man
by borrowing a leg here, an arm there, and a head
from somewhere else. An inward life must create
its own organic form. Further, when you combine
with your original principle, which may be that of
simple trust in Christ, some really incompatible idea
such as that of initiation into secret things of crea
tion, one or the other idea must suffer. There are

The Encounter with Gnosticism 33

some combinations into which Christianity cannot
enter without loss. And yet no prophecy is more
easy to make than that before another generation has
passed away we shall see all manner of incongruous
joinings together of Christian and non-Christian
principles. That is why the story of Gnosticism is
important for us.

There are already in existence sects which attempt
a fusion of Islam and Christianity, or of Hinduism
and Christianity, or of all the three religions together.
The founder of the Ahmadlyas in the Punjab claimed
to be alike the Christian Messiah, the Mohammedan
Mahdi, and the final avatar of the Hindus. The
Chet Ramis in the same province have made a curious
compound of Christian doctrine with Hindu and
Mohammedan ideas and practices. The Isamoshi-
panthis in South Behar have mixed up the story of
Jesus with the story of Krishna. The Radha
Soami sect, while essentially Hindu in teaching and
practice, borrows such Christian phrases as " the
Heavenly Father," "His beloved Son," "Man's
creation in God's image," and many of its forms of
worship are Christian. The founder of the Deva
Samaj in Lahore, Baluchistan and the United Pro
vinces, taught a wonderful compound of doctrines
from Henry Drummond, Herbert Spencer, and
Hinduism.* These movements as yet are small in
influence, but they give a foretaste of what we may
expect to see on a large scale as Christianity spreads
in India.

*See J. N. Farquhar, Modem Religious Movements in India, Chap.
Ill, pp.Jl37-i85.

34 The Ancient Church and Modern India

2. Gnosis (Gnanam).

We can see traces of the beginnings of Gnosti
cism even in the New Testament, in Simon Magus
(as explained by information from other sources), in
the Epistle to the Colossians, the Epistles to Timothy,
the First Epistle of John, the Nicolaitans of the
Apocalypse, and the antinomian teachers mentioned
in the Epistle of Jude. But it was in the second
century, after the great Apostles had passed away,
that Gnosticism so flourished as to menace the future
of the Christian religion.

Christians had been bidden to "add to their faith"
virtue and " knowledge " (gnosis, 2 Peter i. 5). The
writer meant knowledge that is religious and
moral. A man could not have such knowledge and
sin at the same time. " He that saith, I know God,
and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar" (i
John ii. 4). Faith in a person, which is the founda
tion on which the whole Christian religion is built
up, involves no small amount of knowledge. We
intuitively know the person whom we trust. There
is nothing intellectualistic about such knowledge.
But the Greek mind was speculative, and fastened
upon the commendation of knowledge as if it meant
that ignorance rather than sin is the enemy to be
removed, and that enlightenment is the great process
of redemption. We might say that to the Gnostics
the way of faith, or the bhakti marga, was merely the
lowest rung of the ladder at the top of which was
the way of knowledge, or the gnana marga. So
opponents used as a nickname the title Gnostics,
" Men who know " (Gnanis). They thought they

The Encounter with Gnosticism 35

were interpreting the real meaning of Christianity,
but they came to their task with minds full of ideas
such as that matter is evil, so that God can have no
direct connection with the world; and that the actual
maker of the world was one of a chain of many
beings intermediate between God and matter, some
beings more spiritual and nearer to God, others more
material and nearer to the world. To complete their
speculative systems they drew materials from every
source, from magic and astrology as well as from
Greek philosophy. The results are such that we
find it hard to think fairly of the Gnostics; they seem
like idle fellows spinning theories for sheer love of
the exercise. But most of them were better men
than that. The best of them were feeling the need
of a Christian theology which did not yet exist, and
making wild and fantastic attempts after it. Others
were of the ordinary eclectic type, and saw nothing
incongruous in a medley of ideas drawn from the
most unlikely sources. A few baser ones, unless
their orthodox Christian opponents libelled them,
found the moral restrictions of Christianity too rigid,
and wanted a philosophy which would blur over the
distinctions between good and evil, and justify the
kind of life they wished to live. Some Gnostics
were really Christian thinkers, with their balloon of
speculation anchored to the historical facts concern
ing Christ. Others had let go the anchor, and
drifted at the mercy of -every wind of mystic specu
lation or human desire, with little more than remi
niscences of Christianity clinging to the atmosphere
they breathed.

36 The Ancient Church and Modern India

3. Three Gnostic Types.

(a) The magical.

Scholars distinguish, among many Gnostic sys
tems, three main types. The first, of which Simon
Magus may be taken as a specimen, was the crudest,
producing a combination of Christianity and magic,
with apparently the magic predominating. Simon
Magus, we learn from several literary references to
him, was a much more important person than we
might from the book of Acts be led to suppose. He
mingled astrology and the arts of magic with his
teaching, and wandered from place to place with a
companion Helena, who was styled Ennoia, the first
Thought, the creative intelligence of the Deity.

(b) The Syrian.

The second or Syrian type grew up in Syria and
Mesopotamia, countries where varied religions were
in close contact. Christianity was here a somewhat
insignificant element in a confused blend with Baby
lonian star-myths, Syro-Phoenician tales of the origin
of the universe, Persian notions of light and dark
ness, even myths from serpent worship. For in
stance, among the varieties of Gnostics whom we find
attacked in the writings of the great Irenseus, are
Ophites, or snake-worshippers, also called Naasenes,
which is Hebrew for the same thing. They told how
the divine Mother has seven sons, the first of whom,
laldebaoth, fixed his desire upon dregs of matter,
whereby was produced in turn his son, Nous or
Mind, twisted in the form of a serpent. This sym
bol of the serpent seems to have been borrowed from

The Encounter with Gnosticism 37

the Phoenicians and Egyptians, with whom it played
a great part. It is indeed hard for us, who are so
familiar with the sight of snake stones under spread
ing trees, to understand why anyone should have
wished to connect this with the religion of Christ.
Still harder to understand are the Cainites, who, un
less they are grossly libelled, inverted all ordinary
ideas of morality. Cain, according to them, derived
his being from the unknowable Power above. Men
cannot be saved until they have gone through all
kinds of experience, which includes immoral as well
as moral. Such teachings as these were being pro
mulgated as Christianity by sects scattered all over
Syria and Mesopotamia, and the average unlearned
man was not in the position of the modern instructed
Christian with a Bible.

The third or Greek type was the worthiest form
of Gnosticism, upheld by such men as Valentinus,
Basilides, Heracleon, and Bardesanes, all of them
thinkers, some of them poets, who treated Chris
tian history as allegory covering deeper philosophy.
Unfortunately the Greek philosophy often counted
for more than the historic fact, which is the usual
way of allegorical interpretations. As a specimen of
this kind of Gnosticism, take the system of Basilides.
He begins where Hindu Vedantists begin, with a
Supreme Being only to be described in negatives.
From this Supreme Being emanated the following :
Mind, Reason, Understanding, Wisdom, Power,
Virtue (the order is that of their nearness to the

38 The /Indent Church and Modern India

Supreme Being). From these in their turn emanate
other beings, in 365 spiritual grades of existence.
The lowest grade is the heaven which we see, whose
angels made and rule our world, the chief among
them being the God of the Jews. If man was to be
redeemed from this low grade of existence a higher
power was needed, so the unknown Father sent
forth Mind, who appeared in this world and united
himself with Jesus at his baptism. The man Jesus
was merely the instrument of his manifestation, and
even that man only in appearance died on the Cross;
his higher nature returned to its own region. There
by all who believe in him, and are capable of re
demption, are gradually illuminated, purified, and
enabled to ascend on high. The rest have no know
ledge of anything higher, nor desire for it. The
whole theory may seem to us fantastic, but in its
fundamental thought it is closely allied to our advaita
philosophies, while its personifications of mental
principles are very similar to those of which we read
in some books of the Theosophists, the spiritual
descendants of the Gnostics in our own days. And
this system, too, was being spread abroad among
educated men as the true interpretation of the Chris
tian revelation.

4. Marcion.

One of the greatest Gnostics, Marcion, is quite
distinct from the three types mentioned, and needs
separate treatment, for in his own time he was a man
to be reckoned with. The son of a rich ship-owner
at Pontus, he came to Rome about A.D. 139, tried

The Encounter with Gnosticism 39

to reform the Church there, but about A.D. 144 broke
away and founded a Church of his own. He spread
his views by numerous journeys, with the result that
Marcionite Churches soon sprang up in every pro
vince of the Empire, and some of them lasted till
the seventh century A.D. Marcion felt himself to
have discovered the secret of St. Paul, the great con
trast between grace and law, works and faith, Old
and New Testament, and therein he found the key
to all mysteries. The Old Testament is the revela
tion of the creator of the world, the God of the
Jews, the Just God, quite a different being from the
God of love and grace; as such it stands in sharpest
contrast to the Gospel. This world is under the
God of the Jews, governed by an inflexible and some
times brutal law. In direct opposition to that God
is the God of love, absolutely unknown until Christ
revealed Him. Being a God of goodness and
mercy, He could not bear to see men tormented by
their just yet malevolent lord, so appeared in Christ
in order to deliver men's souls (not their bodies,
which like all matter are hopelessly evil) from the
creator of this world. Christ came down from
heaven in the fifteenth year of the reign of the
Emperor Tiberius, assumed the appearance of a
body, and began preaching in Capernaum (Luke iv.
31). Everything which He did was the opposite of
what the merely just God would have done, and at
last the followers of the just God crucified Him.
As to Christian conduct, since this world is under the
power of the inferior God, the strictest asceticism
was enjoined, and no union of the sexes was per-

40 The Ancient Church and Modern India

mitted. Marcion clearly recognized that many of
the Christian documents contradicted his view of
things, so he asserted that corruption had early set
in, and boldly constructed a Canon for his own com
munity, including in it a mutilated Gospel of Luke
and ten of the Epistles of St. Paul, purged of pas
sages which he considered inconsistent. Marcion was
almost the first after Paul to take seriously Paul's
teaching of grace and law, or to see how in it
Christianity brought to the world something new.
He saw many difficulties which he could not solve,
e.g. in the differences between the Old and New
Testament teachings, which we solve to-day by the
conception of a gradual revelation. His worst mis
take was in separating righteousness or justice from
love in God, not recognizing that each of these
qualities is poor without the other, and that both are
essential elements of the one perfect Being. And
his whole thinking was spoiled by the idea which lies
at the root of most of the non-Christian thinking
which we meet in India, the idea that matter is some
thing essentially evil.

All the Gnostic systems had in common certain
fundamental conceptions such as the following : —
Matter is the home of all evil, spirit the home of all
good. This world is a mixture of the two, the pro
duct of a being inferior to the Supreme. There is a
higher world, that of the spirit, inhabited by graded
hierarchies of being emanating successively from
God. There cannot have been a real incarnation, for
that would have placed Christ also in bondage to
evil matter. Man is a captive spirit entangled in

The Encounter with Gnosticism 41

the world of matter. Christ, who is a concentration
of the light and virtue of the spirit world, and high
in the chain of beings between God and man, comes
to deliver the spiritual part of man from matter by
giving him the true understanding of things. Chris
tians may be divided into two classes, the lower,
saved by faith, and the higher, saved by knowledge.
It is certain that some Gnostics borrowed from
Buddhism, and some scholars think that Indian
thought formed the ground-work of most of the
Gnostic systems. There certainly is a remarkable
enough similarity to ideas common in India for us
to think that there is some connection, though k
seems as if the Indian ideas were first absorbed in
Greek philosophy, and in that form brought into
connection with Christianity by the Gnostics.

5. The real danger.

The chief danger from the whole Gnostic move
ment was that the Church might become a Theoso-
phical Society offering enlightenment to an esoteric
circle, instead of a Church of Christ offering redemp
tion to all mankind. It was such men as Irenaeus
who saved the situation by their insistence upon
Christ's historical personality as the basis of all Chris
tian thinking, to which the whole of it must be re
lated, and by reference to which the whole of it must
be justified. The struggle was prolonged, but pro
duced valuable results. " It left a certain mark upon
Catholicism, and partly by shaking older faiths,
partly by preparing men's minds for a better belief,
partly by compelling the leaders of the Church to

42 The Ancient Church and Modern India

ask what they believed and why they believed it,
aided not inconsiderably in the triumph of the
Gospel and in the development of the Creed. But
in the second century, while it was yet living and
aggressive, it constituted a danger greater than the
Arian controversy, greater than any peril that has
ever menaced the existence of the faith."*

6. Results of the Struggle, their Value for India.

One incidental beneficent result of the struggle
was that the Church was forced finally to determine
the limits of the Canon of Scripture. But the most
direct result was the firm establishment of the follow
ing principles which Christians can never afford to
let go, least of all in such a land as India.

1. Christianity is a religion alike for the learned
and the simple, with no reserved places for a select
intellectual aristocracy.

2. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
is the Maker of heaven and earth. This world is
no prison house of spirits, but the creation of His
love.

3. Jesus Christ is no intermediate existence be
tween God and man, but the Son of God and Son
of Man, who came as a real man and unites us to
God.

4. He saves us not from matter, but from sin; not
by enlightenment, but by faith as personal loyalty to
Him.

Christianity has yet to make Indian forms of
theology in India, using familiar Indian religious

* Bigg, Bampton Lectures, p. 35.

The Encounter with Gnosticism 43

terms for its thoughts. The task is a great and
necessary, but also a difficult and dangerous one.
Terms borrowed from other systems are very liable
to bring with them an atmosphere different from the
Christian. The Indian term Gnanam, for example,
has received as many different interpretations as the
Greek term Gnosis. The case of the Gnostics shows
above all things the peril of any getting away from
the historic facts of the revelation of God in Jesus
Christ. Those facts are our touch-stone for the
truth of all theories, and nothing can be accepted as
Christian which does not justify itself in relation to
them. When a Sanskrit pandit tells his class that
the mystic syllable " Om " is the equivalent of " In
the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost," or when the Christian villager puts
a Bible under his pillow to cure a headache, we are
near to the conditions out of which the Gnostic peril
grew. Our safety lies in keeping ever central and
determinative in all our thinking the historic per
sonality of the Founder of our religion. Without
Him there is no Christian thinking.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CHRISTIAN ARGUMENT.

The Argument with Jews Then and Moham
medans Now.

CHRISTIANITY, born in Judaism, disentangled
from Judaism by the efforts of Paul and the
leaders of the Apostolic Age, in the early genera
tions of the Church had its severest conflict with
Jews. There were too many Jews scattered over
the Empire, forming as we have seen seven per cent,
of the whole population, for the destruction of Jeru
salem to bring their religion to an end, and wherever
the religion of Christ went, it was met by them with
bitter hatred.

In fairness we must remember how hard was the
position for the Jew who was confronted with the
rising young religion of Christianity. It seemed
to him that Christians were trampling on all the
ancient glory of the chosen people, while at the same
time they were appropriating the best things of
Judaism and claiming that they belonged to Chris
tians. Circumcision to him had almost the sacred-
ness of a sacrament; the Christians mocked at it and
at many another rite hallowed for the Jew by divine
institution. Worst of all, the Christians were
traitors, so it seemed, to the belief in the one God
which was Israel's message to the world, for they

The Christian Argument 45

proclaimed a second God alongside the Creator, a
deified man who had suffered an ignominious death.
Yet all the time they were claiming the Old Testa
ment as if it were their special property. It will
help us to realize the Jew's feelings if we observe
those of many Mohammedans in India. For Islam
is in its essence Judaism revived, reformed in the
partial light of Christianity, and stereotyped at the
level of Arabian life in the seventh century. The
Mohammedan feels that we are seeking to destroy
the glory of Islam, pride in which is a part of his
religion. He has .the Jew's feeling towards the
uncircumcised outsider. Most of all, he feels that in
our worship of Christ we are unfaithful to monothe
ism. In the struggle with Mohammedanism to-day,
Christianity is engaging in a conflict very similar to
that with Judaism in the first generations.

The early literature is full of indications of the
struggle. Even when writing for Roman Emperors
or for the general public, the defenders of Christianity
found it necessary to explain their attitude to
Judaism and to the Old Testament 'Scriptures.
Antoninus Pius, for instance, if he ever read the
Apology which Justin addressed to him, must have
learnt much about the Jewish law-books and prophets.
But the best sources of information concerning the
formal argument with Judaism are Justin's Dialogue
with Trypho, a Jew; Celsus' attack on Christianity in
the person of a Jew, which is included in and replied
to in Origen's Against Celsus; and Tertullian's book
Against the Jews. As a specimen we will briefly
examine the Dialogue with Trypho.

46 The Ancient Church and Modern India

There was in Ephesus an open space called the
Xystus, laid out with garden walks. There one day
Justin, wearing as always the dress of a philosopher,
is accosted by a group of Jews, one of whom has
escaped from a war lately waged in Palestine. The
conversation naturally turns to religion. Justin
tells a story of himself which might be published in
the Christian Literature Society's series, " How I
became a Christian." Some of the Jews laugh aloud
in mockery, but Trypho wants to hear more, so he
and a few companions retire with Justin to some stone
benches, and the argument proceeds. It is continued
on a second day, and carried on courteously on both
sides. Trypho is unconvinced, but parts as a friend,
wishing Justin safety in the voyage for which he is
daily expecting to set sail.

The following, in briefest summary, are a few of
the things which are said :

TRYPHO : " You Christians live no differently
from the Gentiles, keeping no law, observing neither
sabbaths nor circumcision. While thus disobeying
God, you set your hopes on a man who was
crucified."

JUSTIN : " A new and final law has been given to
us, and a new covenant. Look at your Scriptures,
Isaiah liii. to liv., Iv. verse 3 and following, Jeremiah
xxxi., and many other places. It is you who disobey
God, your land is justly desolate by God's visitation,
and you may not even go up to Jerusalem."

(It is curious to notice the history of this particu
larly bad argument. Justin uses it against the Jews.
For several generations Mohammedans in India have

The Christian Argument 47

used the Turkish control of Jerusalem as an argu
ment against Christianity. The result of the war
offers a great temptation to Christians to revive the
use of this weapon, but it is to be hoped that the
temptation will be victoriously resisted.) " If all
must be circumcised, what of Adam, Noah, Enoch,
Melchizedek, who were not ? Jesus brings the true
circumcision of the heart. What need of the out
ward fleshly sign of circumcision have I, who have
been witnessed to by Christ?"

TRYPHO : " But Daniel vii. and such Scriptures
lead us to expect a glorious Christ, not one like
yours, crucified."

JUSTIN : " You have not understood that there are
two advents, the first in suffering, the second in
glory."

TRYPHO : " But do you actually seek to persuade
us that this crucified man was with Moses and Aaron,
that later he became a man, was crucified, ascended
to heaven, will come again, and ought to be wor
shipped?"

JUSTIN : " I am prepared to prove every word of
this from your own Scriptures."

Here begins the main argument in the book, an
elaborate use of Scripture texts, often loosely quoted,
usually allegorically interpreted, chosen with great
skill to prove that there was a divine Being who
appeared to Abraham, to Jacob, and to Moses, who is
called God, and yet is distinct from Him who made
all things. Granted the principles of exegesis which
were generally accepted in those days, and given the
Septuagint translation, not the Hebrew text, of the

48 The Ancient Church and Modern India

Old Testament, the proof becomes quite an impres
sive one, and we can understand Trypho saying :
" These are perilous thoughts, but you seem to prove
them from Scripture." Evidently among Christians
there had been developed a great system of Old Tes
tament quotations, which Justin used with great
skill. Everything in the Old Testament which could
by any allegorical method be referred to the Messiah
is shown as fulfilled in Jesus, while most things
which the Gospels record as happening to Jesus are
shown as foretold in the Old Testament. While
some parts of the argument are valid to-day as an
argument from prophecy, there is certainly much
which now we must discard. It served its purpose in
its day, and the Jew could hot criticize a method
which he was constantly using himself. Moreover,
at its base was the true fundamental idea that Jesus
is the incarnation of an eternal being for whose ad
vent God was always preparing the world. But there
lurked in the method one special danger which Justin
himself did not wholly escape. The Christ who
could be pieced together from fragments of pro
phecy or from verbal correspondences between the
Gospels and the Old Testament was a poor substi
tute for the rich and living personality depicted in
the gospels when simply read as meaning what they
say. The living Jesus, who was absolutely new in
the world, is the substance of the Christian's mes
sage, and the argument from prophecy is only valu
able when His actual portrait stands ever in the
foreground.

Place alongside of the Christian argument with

The Christian Argument 49

Jews the modern argument with Mohammedans, and
each will throw light upon the other.*

Mohammedans speak of themselves, Jews, and
Christians as " people of a book " (Ahli Kitab). As
with the Jew, so with the earnest-minded Mohamme
dan, any religious appeal must be justified by some
passage from the Scripture, and the argument from
prophecy has special power. The Christian who
would testify to Mohammedans must know his Old
Testament, and many passages in it he should learn
by heart.

Again, just as the early Christians showed that
a purely Unitarian conception of God cannot be the
final truth, so the modern Christian can prove to the
Mohammedan that in spite of his own claim he is
not, nor can he be, a consistent Unitarian. The
attitude of devotion and something like adoration
taken up towards the prophet himself, still more the
common practices of uneducated Mohammedans at
the tombs of saints, are indications that the human
soul cannot rest permanently satisfied with the wor
ship of a unitary absolute God.

The argument for the Gospel against the Law is
essentially the same now as in Justin's day. There
is the sharpest possible contrast between the glorious
liberty with which Christ sets men free, and the
legalistic spirit of Mohammed which regulated the
height of trousers above the ankles and the trim
ming of moustaches.

* See "The Vital Forces of Christianity and Islam, " Internatioanl
Review of Missions, Jan., 191 2 -April, '1913. f Reprinted in book
form, Oxford University Press, 1915.

50 The Ancient Church and Modern India

In the early centuries no Christian teaching was
more prominent in the presentation of Christianity
to non-Christians than the doctrine of the Word.
That doctrine has still its part to play, for Islam has
its own Logos doctrine, which might be summed up
as " The Word became a book," over against our
message that " The Word became flesh." It ought
not to be too 'difficult for us to show how much
greater is the living Christ than the dead letter of
the Koran.

And ever in the foreground, more prominently
than it was placed by the ancient Christian writers,
must stand the portrait of Jesus in the gospels. The
character of Christ attracts Moslems as it attracts
all men, especially if His spiritual strength is clearly
emphasized. The Mohammedan who worships power
needs to discover the " divine energy, exhaustless
vigour, and resistless power," in the figure of our
Lord. That is an ideal which he can understand,
higher than anything he has seen anywhere else, and
he will give it his allegiance.

2. The Argument with the General Public, Then
and Now.

It required no common courage to write to a
Roman Emperor a public defence of the Christian
religion in the second century. But there were men
who took their life in their hands and did it. From
their books we can see the Christianity of the time
as it was stated to the authorities and the general
public. They are commonly called " Apologists,"
a name which means not that they apologized for

The Christian Argument 51

Christianity, but that they defended it. Most of
them were philosophers, and one of them (Aristides)
quite possibly wrote from Athens, the home of
philosophy. Justin Martyr lived the life of the
philosopher Christian in the Roman capital itself.
The writer of perhaps the most beautiful defence,
the author of the Epistle to Diognetus, has set no
name to his work. Only one of these earlier de
fenders so far as we know wrote in Latin, and he
was a Roman lawyer (Minucius Felix) who composed
a dialogue, after the best Latin classical models, in
defence of Christianity. We can see the style in
which most of them wrote from the opening para
graph of the Epistle to Diognetus. " Since I see,
most excellent Diognetus, that thou art exceedingly
anxious to understand the religion of the Christians;
and that thy enquiries respecting them are distinctly
and carefully made, as to what God they trust and
how they worship Him, that they all disregard the
world and despise death and take no account of those
who are regarded as gods by the Greeks, neither
observe the superstition of the Jews; and as to the
nature of the affection which they entertain one to
another, and of this new development or interest,
which has entered into men's lives now and not
before : I gladly welcome this zeal in thee, and I
ask of God, Who supplieth both the speaking and
the hearing to us, that it may be granted to myself
to speak in such a way that thou mayest be made
better by the hearing, and to thee that thou mayest
so listen that I the speaker may not be disappointed."*

* Lightfoot, Apostolic^ Fathers, p. 503.

f2 The Ancient Church and Modern India

No one can read their work without being im
pressed with their strength, their culture, their Chris
tian devotion, and the cogency of their main argu
ments. The Christian religion was upheld by them
in a spirit which may still serve as a model. But
there was a weakness in their method worth noting,
that we may avoid it in India.

Christianity as a Philosophy.

They felt themselves under the necessity of pre
senting their religion to outsiders as though it were
a philosophy. Christianity doubtless implies a
philosophy, but is first and foremost a life. The
Logos conception is their favourite weapon. We
must remember that educated men were in those days
talking of the Logos as much as in our day they are
talking of evolution or of post-war reconstruction.
In the handling of this conception the Apologists
showed magnificent broad-mindedness. They did
not feel compelled as some do to look with a jealous
eye upon any wisdom or goodness seen in non-
Christian life or literature. For it was all theirs,
being all due to the Word. " Whatsoever things
have been well said in any men's words belong to us
Christians : for we worship and love, next to God,
the Word who cometh forth from the unborn and
unutterable God, since for our sakes also He
hath become man."* Socrates was a Christian,
for he lived by Reason (the Logos). But herein lay
a snare. This truth needs to be balanced by the
corresponding truth that in Jesus Christ there has

* Justin, Ap. 2.

The Christian Argument 53

come to the world something absolutely new, viz.
His own divine-human self, and not merely the clear
revelation of things which before Him were dimly
and fragmentarily known. The Apologists did not
forget that after all the essence of the gospel is that
that Word has become flesh and appeared as man.
But they did not put as clearly into the foreground
as we could have wished the living, breathing figure
of Jesus of Nazareth.

Christians not Atheists.

It seems strange to find them obliged seriously to
repel the charge of atheism, but it shows us how
puzzling the Christian religion must have appeared
to outsiders. It was always telling people not to
believe in the gods, and it had no visible gods of its
own. It must be a club of atheists! The Chris
tian defenders naturally found no difficulty in re
butting this charge, and carried the war into the
enemies' country by affirming that the real atheists
are those who accept the immoral stories told of
most of the Greek gods, since what is not good can
not be divine. They knew the religion which they
were attacking, most of them having grown up in
it. Therein they differ from many modern writers
who perforce must glean from books and external
observation their knowledge of the lives of those
to whom they are presenting Christ. These men
knew how a Greek felt, for they had felt that way
themselves until Christ changed them. They some
times ridiculed their opponents' superstitions, but
more often they denounced their shameless immorality.

54 The Ancient Church and Modern India

Christian living the great argument.

Knowing as we do that the Christians were the
body of people of all others in that day who were
living lives of moral purity, we find it strange that
they had to give space to rebutting charges of
promiscuous sexual intercourse and of cannibalism.
The best answer was simply to set forth the actual
life that Christians lived. Here was their strongest
weapon, and it always will be the strongest weapon
in Christian propaganda. After all, Christianity
works; it makes men good. Nothing impresses the
outsider so much as that.

" We who formerly delighted in fornication,
but now embrace chastity alone; we who formerly
used magical arts, dedicate ourselves to the good
and unbegotten God; we who valued above all
things the acquisition of wealth and possessions,
now bring what we have into a common stock,
and communicate to every one in need; we who
hated and destroyed one another, and on account
of their different manners would not live with
men of a different tribe, now since the coming of
Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for
our enemies, and endeavour to persuade those who
hate us unjustly to live conformably to the good
precepts of Christ, to the end that they may
become partakers with us of the same joyful hope
of a reward from God the ruler of all."*

Demand for a fair hearing.

Setting forth all these matters, these men claimed

* Justin, Ap. i.

The Christian Argument 55

a fair hearing in the courts. Christians were being
punished not for crimes, but for the name Christian.
With quite unanswerable reasoning they showed this
to be as absurd as it was cruel. But having put their
case with all clearness, they calmly told the Emperors
that whatever happened they would continue to
follow Christ. Think of the cool courage in such
words as these, written in the very city of the
Emperor and plainly signed. "And if you also
read these words in a hostile spirit, you can do no
more, as I said before, than to kill us; which indeed
does no harm to us, but to you and all who unjustly
hate us and do not repent, brings eternal punish
ment by fire."*

Modern Indian Apologists in Vernacular Literature.
The work of the Apologists still waits to be done
in many vernaculars in India. The Indian educated
in English is freed from many misconceptions, and
has so much literature on Christianity available to
him that if he does not understand the religion it is
not for want of literary statements of it. But in the
villages such strange misconceptions still prevail,
such curious libels about Christian habits, Christian
institutions, and Christian living are still current,
that apologists in the vernaculars have a great task
to perform. If they have learnt the lessons of the
past, they will be just and generous towards all that
is good in non-Christian systems, but they will make
it clear that Christ brings to the world a gift quite
new, ^ the gift of Himself. The Jesus of history,
the living Jesus who ate and drank and taught and

* Justin, Ap. i.

56 The Ancient Church and Modern India

suffered, will stand out always in the forefront of
all that they say. And next to the figure of Jesus
Himself they will emphasize, as the Apologists
emphasized, the miracles which He has wrought in
transforming human life. Real as are the faults to
be deplored in our Christian Churches, yet when
men's pre-Christian and their Christian conditions
are fairly compared, the argument from Christian
life stands to-day as ever.

The mass-movements are dealing with the lowest
classes of society in India, but they too can reinforce
the " argument from life." Village caste men who
opposed Christianity have said, " We have seen what
Christianity has done for the Malas of our own
village. Before they became Christians they were
always drinking and quarrelling; they used to poison
our cattle and steal our grain. Now they have given
up all their evil ways, and the only desire they have
is to get their children educated so that they may
be fit to go out as teachers." Such testimony counts
for more than all the reasonings of learning. Next
to pointing men to the living Jesus direct, the most
convincing thing that we can do is to point them to
lives which He has transformed.

3. A Detailed Defence of Christianity.

Towards the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius,
a Greek Platonist named Celsus wrote a thorough
and comprehensive attack on the Christian religion.
He was a man of religious temperament, yet full
of the Greek contempt for barbarians, and he de
tested Christianity alike on patriotic, religious, and

The Christian Argument 57

philosophical grounds. He named his book The
True Word) which we are able to a considerable
extent to piece together from the full quotations of
it made long afterwards by the great Christian
teacher Origen in his answer. The first part of
Celsus' book consisted of an attack made upon
Christianity from the point of view of a Jew,
covering comprehensively the same ground as has
been described in the first section of this chapter.
The second and larger part consists of Celsus5 attack
in his own person, and much of it is very near to
our own controversy with Hindus. This great
attack remained unanswered for seventy years, until
the learned Origen, then more than sixty years old,
was persuaded to answer it. His reply is one of
the greatest defences of Christianity ever written,
and well worth the study of those who follow in his
footsteps in upholding the religion of Christ to-day.
The book is lengthy, but the following condensa
tion in dialogue form will give some idea of its main
lines of attack and defence, and will show how
relevant is Origen's book to the situation in India,
where Christianity is frequently attacked by educated
men whose philosophy, whose religious upbringing,
even whose prejudices, are akin to those of Celsus
who wrote in the second century.

CELSUS : What is true In Christianity is not new
or original^ but had been better said previously by
philosophers; Christianity has not the prestige of
antiquity.

ORIGEN : <c The originality of the Christians'
dogmas lies in their moral force." As to antiquity,

58 The Ancient Church and Modern India

Christ is not the first manifestation of the deity, but
the culminating point in a series of divine manifes
tations, which has found in Him its consummation.
" Nothing beautiful has ever been done among men
without the entrance of the Divine Word into the
souls of those who were able to receive though only
a little of His energy."

CELSUS : The story of the virgin birth is an in
credible fiction covering up a scandal of immorality.

ORIGEN : If Jesus was, as you allege, the illegi
timate son of a Roman soldier and an immoral
Jewess, how will you explain that He has shaken
the whole world to its foundations? As to the
virgin birth being incredible, " Why should there
not be a soul which receives a body altogether
miraculous, which has something in common with
the rest of men that it may be able to live along
with them, and something unique that it may con
tinue untouched by sin ?"

CELSUS : What proof is there of Jesus'* Divinity?
Miracles? Sorcerers in the market-place do those
for a few cash. God does not will anything contrary
to nature. How can you distinguish Jesus'* claims
to be divine from those of countless others?

ORIGEN : There is abundant proof from prophecy.
His teaching is such that all fair-minded men recog
nize in it the voice of God. In the special kind of
miracles that He wrought we are forced to see the
hand of God. But it is the moral force exercised
by Christianity in the world which most clearly
proves the divinity of its Founder. The results
accomplished by Jesus could not have been brought

The Christian Argument 59

about save by divine power. In the work accom
plished by Greek gods such as Minos or Perseus
there is nothing to compel our assent to the stories
about the divinity of their origin. But in Chris
tianity " The eyes of the blind in soul are always
being opened, and ears which were deaf to virtue
listen with eagerness to the teaching concerning God
and the blessed life with Him." It is true, as you
say, that God does not will anything " contrary to
nature." But " there are some things above nature
which God could at any time do; for example, the
raising of a man above the nature of a man, and
making him a partaker of the divine nature." There
is the great miracle of sudden conversion. You
may compare the miracles of Christ with other
miracle stories, and " If you look to the relative
improvement in morals and in piety, you will
acknowledge that a divine power was at work in
Jesus and not in others."

CELSUS : Christians have no culture: they say,
" Let no man come to us who is learned or wise or
prudent; but whoso is stupid or ignorant or boyish,
he may come with confidence. The only converts we
care to have (or indeed can get) are the silly, the
ignoble, and the senseless, the slaves, the women,
and the children."

ORIGEN : It is quite true that the ignorant and
unlearned are invited by us, for the Word promises
to heal such and make all worthy of God. More
over, surely these epithets are more fitly applied to
those who pray for life to that which is dead.

CELSUS : Christians have a very suspicious fond-

6o The Ancient Church and Modern India

ness for sinners. They call the worst people to them
selves as if they were forming a robber band. They
talk of forgiveness of sins, but if God were to for
give sins He would be grossly unjust.

ORIGEN : We do summon to us the same class of
people that a robber summons; but not to the same
calling. Our whole Christian case rests upon the
change which Christianity makes in the lives of even
the worst.

CELSUS : Christians are supremely ridiculous in
the exclusiveness of their claims, like worms in a
corner of the dung-hill, crying out " To us God
reveals all things, and with us alone He holds inter
course ."

ORIGEN : The human soul is not on a level with
the worm, but is of infinite value. This doctrine
always tends to appear foolishness to proud and
learned people like Celsus, but it lies at the heart of
the teaching of Christ.

CELSUS : Christians believe in the resurrection
of the body — a hope fit for worms.

ORIGEN : " We do not say that the corrupted body
will return to its original state, for the corrupted
grain of corn does not return to its original state.
But we say that as in the case of the grain of corn
a stalk arises, so a certain principle of relation is
implanted in the body, and that from this, which is
not corrupted, the body will rise in incorruption."

CELSUS : The Christians'* theory of incarnation
is impossible, for it involves change in the unchange
able nature of God, and material flesh would soil the
spirit of God. And why should incarnation happen

The Christian Argument 61

In that particular time and place, why not before, and
in a nobler race?

ORIGEN : You cannot understand the truth of in
carnation because of your fundamental error in sup
posing matter to be essentially evil. It is not the
body which is the seat of evil, but the mind and its
actions, " and, according to us, to speak accurately,
nothing else is evil." As to the circumstances of
the incarnation, place and race were specially pre
pared for the event, and the incarnation took place
" in the fulness of time."

CELSUS : The Christians* language about God is
childishly anthropomorphic, expressing an inferior
conception of God. God is self-contained, passion
less, and far above the world.

ORTGEN : Some of the Christian language is
anthropomorphic, being the language of a teacher
to young children. The Word of God adapts His
message to the capacity of the hearers.

CELSUS : The Christians foolishly attack our
worship of idols as if we identified the idols with
God, whereas we know as well as do the Christians
that they are things dedicated to, and statues of,
God. Christians boast of how they can insult the
idols with impunity, and they turn that into an argu
ment. But did your Jesus do anything when He
was insulted?

ORIGEN : We do not approve of reviling of
images. " Abuse of any kind, even when naturally
evoked by injustice, is foreign to the spirit of Chris
tianity, and to abuse mere lifeless images is silliness.
But our statues are not made by worthless artisans,

62 The Ancient Church and Modern India

but are fashioned in us by the word of God. These
statues are the virtues which are imitations of the
First-born of every creature, in whom are the ideals
of all the virtues. And just as there is great differ
ence in the fashioning of images and statues, as some
are wonderfully perfect, like the statues of Phidias
and Polycleitus, so is it with the making of spiritual
statues. . . . But surpassing all in the whole creation
is the image in the Saviour who said, " The Father
in me."

CELSUS : The Gospels are untrustworthy, their
narratives incredible, their style and language beneath
contempt.

ORIGEN : " It is abundantly clear to all men of
intelligence that the good faith of the writers, joined,
so to speak, to their great simplicity, received a
diviner virtue which has accomplished far more than
it seemed possible to accomplish by Greek rhetoric
with its graceful diction, its elaborate style, its logical
divisions and systematic order."

CELSUS : Christians are unpatriotic, caring nothing
for the Empire. " Help the Emperor with all your
might, share his labours in righteous fashion, fight
for him-, march with him to the field, take your share
in the government of your fatherland, and do this
for the preservation of the law and of piety "

ORIGEN : Christians are true and loyal benefactors
of their country, since they train men in piety
towards God, and induce them to be faithful as
citizens here by inspiring them with the hope of a
heavenly citizenship. Save in this indirect way,
Christians take no part in political life.

The Christian Argument 63

CELSUS : Why should Christians make such a
fuss about a difference of name for Deity, since all
names cover the same reality?

ORIGEN : A Christian will die rather than call God
Zeus, because that name is associated in the minds
of men with shameful deeds. But " appellatives
may be used of God in every language, and He hears
them all." On the other hand, proper names have
in them some mysterious force.

As even this bare summary will indicate, most of
this argument might have taken place in Madras or
the Punjab instead of in Alexandria. How familiar
in India is the reproach that Christianity has only
been able to win over the outcastes, the women and
children! We answer not less boldly than Origen.
It is an essential mark of the religion of Christ to
seek out the lowliest and the lost. And when the
broad results of the mass-movements are measured
up, and the moral achievements for the outcastes
fairly weighed, we too can show traces of the work
ing of a power which must be divine.

Notice the unerring instinct which makes Origen
point out that the root error of Greek, which is also
that of Hindu, thought is the idea of the evil of
matter, and how near he comes to the language of
modern philosophy which says that there is nothing
good but a good will, as there is nothing evil but
an evil will.

We can be bolder than Origen in defending the
Christian language about God. We have the con
ception of a gradual revelation, explaining some of

64 The Ancient Church and Modern India

the Old Testament statements which to Celsus
appeared so shocking. Moreover we are less im
pressed than the people of those times with philoso
phical terms which are all negative or abstract; we
know that we can express the most essential truth
about God in frankly personal language.

Especially practical in its suggestiveness is
Origen's reply concerning idolatry. Abuse of idols
is futile; but it can be shown that human lives far
better than any marble can set forth the love,
spirituality, purity of God. But statues are not all
perfect, as every sculptor is not a Phidias. The one
perfect statue of the very reality of the Eternal is
the human life of Him who more than once in the
New Testament is styled the Image of God.

Very remarkable is it to read at the end of Celsus'
book the appeal for the patriotic co-operation of
Christians, written near the time when, at any rate
in Gaul, Christians were being tortured to death in
the name of the welfare of the Empire. But one
of the great wars with the barbarians was going on,
and even Christians were to be rallied to save their
country from invasion. Christians in India can
respond to such an appeal with greater confidence
than could those of Origen's time, when the ques
tion whether a Christian could lawfully participate in
public affairs was still a matter of debate. In India
affairs of state are not entangled with polytheistic
religion, as they were in the Roman Empire. It is
clear now that, provided the motive be right, a
Christian can do unselfish service to God and country
in almost any sphere — in municipal life, in imperial

The Christian Argument 65

politics, in any of the professions. Only he must
be sure in his own heart that he is in the place where
God has put him. India has everything to gain
from the contribution which Christian men with such
a sense of God can make to her corporate life.

Origen's main line of defence is as strong to-day
as ever. Christianity is the final religion, because
it brings man into fellowship with God, not in idea
but in fact. It does it by proclaiming the Divine
Man, whose figure is central and determinative for
all Origen's thought and life. The sure defence of
the Christian religion is to set forth Christ Himself.
And second only to the emphasis on Christ Himself
is the emphasis on the moral results of faith in
Christ. That faith changes men as does nothing
else in the world, and the power that makes bad
men good must come from a divine source. Next
to the character of Jesus Christ Himself, the life
transformed by faith in Him is the most effective
apology.

4. Two attitudes to pre-Christian thought.

St. Paul and the writer of the Epistle to the
Hebrews alike showed the Old Testament dis
pensation as a divinely ordained preparation for
the New. The one found that law had been
the " pedagogue " to bring us to Christ, like
the slave who took the boy by the hand and
led him to his teacher; the other found in the
whole Mosaic system the antitype and shadow of
what was to come. Yet we can discern very
different tendencies in the kind of emphasis used by

66 The Ancient Church and Modern India

these writers. St. Paul is thinking of " the law "
as a legal code making ethical demands which ulti
mately are impossible for unaided man to fulfil. The
writer to the Hebrews is thinking of " the law " as
a system of worship, and a series of sacred institu
tions growing up around that worship. Conse
quently St. Paul sets law and gospel in sharp con
trast, while the writer to the Hebrews shows the
gospel rather as the spiritual fulfilment or inner
reality of the law. St. Paul thought of the law
as an inexorable task-master from whom the
Christian was delivered. To the Christian the law
was dead. " Ye are no longer under law." The
writer to the Hebrews felt that in Christianity the
institutions of Judaism lived on gloriously trans
formed. cc He makes it his aim to show that every
name, every institution, every privilege which had
existed under the old economy, survived in the new,
but invested with a higher meaning and a truer
glory."*

There is room for both kinds of emphasis to bring
out the whole truth. Doubtless some Jewish Chris
tians were helped by the thoughts of the Epistle to
the Hebrews who would have found it difficult to
follow St. Paul. Christ came not to destroy but to
fulfil. And yet in fulfilling He made vital changes
which sometimes can be most clearly shown by con
trasting the old with the new.

In general far more Christians seem to have
followed the writer to the Hebrews than St. Paul.
The first few generations of Christians had mainly

* Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament.

The Christian Argument 67

the Old Testament as their Bible. Most of them
were more conscious of their continuity with Judaism
than of their differences from it. They would have
had a stronger spiritual life had they absorbed more
of St. Paul's teaching concerning the vital difference
between law and grace, the old and the new.

The problem as to which was the right attitude
became much more complex when Christianity en
countered pagan systems. There was no study of
the history of religion to enable Christians to look
at non-Christian religious phenomena with the de
tached attitude of the scientist. A great deal of the
paganism of the period was coarse and immoral, a
potent cause of the terrible corruption of the
manners and customs of ordinary society at the
period. Naturally some Christian converts desired
to forget all about their pre-Christian habits, to think
of the surrounding paganism with fierce hostility,
and to live as far as possible in a separate world, only
remembering from time to time in humility the
Apostle's reminder " and such were some of you "
(i Cor. vi. n). But there were others who re
membered enough of good in the old religion to
realize that with all its faults it represented the only
religious preparation for the gospel which had once
been available, a preparation which could not have
been given without the divine Providence. They
thought of the Word illuminating all men, and saw
His work in anything beautiful or true. Sometimes
an old Greek myth could serve as vehicle for a Chris
tian meaning. No less firmly than others they could
denounce the immoralities of the old, but the best
F

68 The Ancient Church and Modern India

of the old seemed to them a fable whose ultimate
meaning must be sought in the truth of Christ.

Again we can say that both were right. Some
realized the greatness of their salvation best in sharp
contrast with what had gone before. Yet surely
the richer measure of truth was theirs who could
discern in pre-Christian thought some rays of divine
truth whose source was in the Sun of Righteousness.
Provided they never forgot that that which saves
men is that " the Word became flesh " in the his
toric Jesus, they were happier who could trace his
operations over the wider range, even beyond the
bounds of the Christian religion, " lighting every
man, coming into the world " (John i. 9, R.V.).
What is more important, they were better equipped
for Christian propaganda. With hearts beating in
sympathy with the best Greek religious thought, they
could communicate Gospel truth in a language which
the best Greeks easily understood. Continual de
nunciation merely provokes; the Christian spirit of
love is best understood when it manifests itself in
appreciation of all truth, goodness, and beauty,
wherever found.

Typical representatives of these two schools are
Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Alexandria.
Tertullian is the fierce controversialist, scoring
powerful points, denouncing wickedness, some
times making his opponent writhe under ridicule
and sarcasm. Clement is the Greek scholar who
loves the ancient literature so well that he can
scarcely write two sentences without quoting from
it. In the Catechetical School at Alexandria, over

The Christian Argument 69

which he presided, Greek thought was carefully
studied and appreciated, and the partial light vouch
safed to Plato or Aristotle was shown to be an
earnest of the " Dayspring from on high." Ima
gine how different must have been the effect made
upon pagan readers by two such passages as the
following. Tertullian in the full flow of fervid and
eloquent argument in defence of the Christians,
writes :

" True, your Gods do not feel the injuries
and insults attendant upon their manufacture
any more than they perceive the devotion you
render them. ( O impious words ! O sacrile
gious abuse!' Yes, gnash your teeth and foam
with rage! You are the same persons who ap
prove of a Seneca inveighing against your super
stition at greater length and more bitterly. If,
therefore, we do not worship statues and cold
images, the very facsimiles of their dead
originals, which the kites and mice and spiders
have an accurate knowledge of, do we not de
serve praise rather than punishment for our
repudiation of a recognized error?"

The words would make their effect by being so
red-hot, but Clement found a more excellent way
in his Exhortation to the Greeks. He turned to
account the old legends of Orpheus and Eunomus,
who sang the songs which charmed beasts and ser
pents, trees, and stones. This tale, said Clement,
is true of our new Orpheus Christ; for though men
were more rapacious than wolves, more cunning

7<D The Ancient Church and Modern India

than serpents, more senseless than stocks and
stones, our new Orpheus has sung a song which
has utterly tamed them and drawn them after Him.
" See how mighty is the new song ! It has made
men out of stones and men out of wild beasts."* The
theme of the new song is the coming of Christ to earth
to reveal God, to stay corruption, to conquer death,
and to reconcile disobedient sons to their Father.
Clement does not shrink from condemnation of real
abominations in the Greek religion, but he uses its
religious language for conveying the essential truth
of the Christian Gospel with a winsomeness which
must have been powerful to attract. Every Greek
who read his book must have felt at home with it.
Here was the Greek style, Greek genius, Greek
literary allusions with nothing foreign or barbarous,
yet here was truth new and alluring.

The Indian Church has its Tertullians and its
Clements. Some feel that everything Hindu must
be avoided as a taint, and find almost a malicious
joy in denouncing the evils of <£ heathenism."
Others remember with affection old stories which
can carry an effective Christian message, and the
old devotional songs which can best express their
feeling towards their Saviour Christ. All have to
bear in mind that in India too the Word enlightened
men, and that India's age-long hunger after one
ness with God was no unworthy preparation for the
new message about Christ. Such criticism or de
nunciation as may be necessary can itself only be
effective when spoken in the spirit of love. Then

* Exhortation to the Greeks, Ch. I.

The Christian Argument 71

it falls into its proper subordinate place among the
whole message that wins the heart. The call of
Christ still sounds in Hindu ears as a voice that is
foreign and barbarous. The Church which He
founded looks like a Western structure. Its cus
toms, its pictures, its music, its theological terms,
seem all to have originated in Europe or America.
It is hard to remember that they all grew out of a
life lived in the East. It will be so until there are
more men and women in India whose pulses thrill
responsive to all that is best in her ancient past,
with a love second only to the passionate self-
abandonment of trust and love which draws them
to the feet of the Lord of East as well as of West.
It is not a question of adapting Christ to suit Hindu
prejudices, which would be to bear false witness.
For European or Indian there can be only one
Christ, the historical divine-human Jesus of Naza
reth, and one attitude of devotion and self-sur
render to Him. There can be no tampering with
facts to make an Indian Gospel. But true Indian
bhakti towards that same Jesus Christ will find
Indian ways of expressing itself, will create cus
toms whose appearance may be half Hindu, but
whose meaning is wholly Christian, and will give
rise to activities more akin to the brooding spirit
of the East than to the bustling energy of the West.
Then for the first time the eyes of the multitudes
of India's people will see clear the vision of the
Saviour.

That is why India needs many Clements, men
with Clement's gifts of thought and of religious

72 The Ancient Church and Modern India

emotion, and with his faculty for making non-Chris
tian language convey to non-Christian hearts the
clear call of Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER V.

SUFFERING FOR CHRIST.

IT was by suffering that Christianity won its way
to supremacy in the ancient world. We read the
story that we may know the price that was paid in
human pain for the transmission of this religion to
us, and that we may catch the stimulus of noble
examples. Sometimes details of the martyrdoms
have been dwelt on in a way that is morbid, as in
some devotional books widely read in the middle
ages. While avoiding this temptation we ought to
read some of the records which tell how heroic Chris
tianity overcame fiendish cruelty by its strength to
endure.

i. The Cross of Perpetual Insecurity.

Christians were not always being hunted down.
For long periods and in many places they were
undisturbed, sometimes throughout the whole
Empire, as, for instance, in the " long peace " from
260-303. But at most times and in most places
they lived in an uncertainty which must have been
peculiarly hard to bear. This is not the place to
explain why Christians appeared to many of the
rulers as enemies of the State, why slanderous stories
of shameful practices circulated everywhere about
them, or why any sudden calamity was ascribed by

74 The Ancient Church and Modern India

the mob to their baneful influence. Nor need the
painful story here be told of the various methods
used for the suppression of the Christians under
Nero or Domitian, Trajan or Severus, Decius or
Diocletian. The outstanding fact is that for two
and a half centuries the cross which every Christian
had to bear was not perpetual persecution, but the
knowledge that any day the worst cruelty and lust
of a brutal age might be let loose upon him, as from
time to time it had been let loose upon Christians
in the past. What this meant to sensitive natures
can hardly be estimated, but we see traces of its
effects in the writings of such men as Justin or
Tertullian. Tertullian seems to have been an eye
witness of scenes which burnt themselves into his
brain and which were never far from his thoughts.
He lived, as lived many a Christian of his day, in
the continual consciousness that insult, nakedness,
torture, and death might at any moment of popular
outbreak be his portion. That was one of the
influences which shaped him and which must be
borne in mind when we are inclined to criticize
Tertullian as an intolerant and red-hot extremist.
The strain of fanaticism in the early Christians is
not so wonderful as their steadfast courage.

2. Typical Scenes.

Let us try to picture a few events typical of many.
(a) Bithynia.

It is the year 112. The Emperor's intimate
friend Pliny, the new Governor of Bithynia, shocked
to discover throughout his province ramifications of

Suffering for Christ 75

" perverse and excessive superstitions " hitherto
unknown to him, has been dealing summarily with
the Christians. Those who confessed themselves
have been three times questioned and if they per
severed led away to execution. Others who say
they were once Christians but have given it up have,
in Pliny's presence, called on the gods, offered
incense and wine before the Emperor's statue, and
reviled Christ. These may be set free, but their
account of what they formerly did as Christians
greatly puzzles the Governor in its lack of any
abominations. c' They had been accustomed,"
writes Pliny afterwards, " on an appointed day to
assemble before dawn to sing antiphonally to Christ
as to a god; and to bind themselves by an oath, not
for a criminal purpose, but never to commit theft or
robbery or adultery, nor to break their word, nor
to refuse a deposit when called upon to restore it;
and, this accomplished, it had been their habit to
separate and meet together again to partake in
common of a harmless meal, but they had ceased to
do this after my edict." Surely they must be con
cealing something. Pliny is determined to get at
the truth somehow or other. Two women stand
there whom the Christians call deaconesses, but they
are only slaves. " Put them on the rack," says the
Governor. So the limbs of two poor faithful are
strained, two of the great army of women who from
first to last suffered in their bodies for Christ. But
no revelation of hideous doings falls from their lips,
and Pliny has to write to the Emperor a puzzled
letter which has been well called the first apology

76 The Ancient Church and Modern India

for Christianity, from its clear testimony to the
innocence of the lives which the Christians led.

(b) Ignatius' Journey.

Not very long after this there passed through Asia
Minor and Macedonia an escort party of ten Roman
soldiers in charge of a notable prisoner who was
young and strong and of lowly birth, for he had been
sentenced to death by wild beasts in the great amphi
theatre at Rome. But he was held in high honour
by the Christians, for he was Ignatius, Bishop of the
great Church in Antioch. We see him on the way
receiving deputations from Churches, writing long
letters and despatching messengers, sometimes ac
companied by friends for many miles of his journey.
Some of those letters have come down to us, and
portray a man living at a white heat of intense emo
tion. He is full of passionate longing for martyrdom.
Moment by moment he sees vividly before his mind
the scene in the amphitheatre; the arena, the pitiless
gazing multitude, the spring of the lion, and the
rending of his victim. This suffering he feels will
make all his experience of Christ more real. " Now,"
he says, C£ I begin to be a disciple. He who is near to
the sword is near to God. He who is among wild
beasts is in company with God." His chains are " a
necklace of jewels to adorn him," and he dreads no
thing so much as the possibility of his being released
after all. Withal he is an intensely humble man.
When speaking of his own Church at Antioch he
constantly uses words such as these : " I am ashamed
to be counted one of them. For indeed I am not

Suffering for Christ 77

worthy of being the very least of them, and one born
out of due time."

So he passes on to Rome, leaving a line of light
in the Churches behind him, and one day in the vast
Flavian amphitheatre, which we now know as the
Colosseum, the crowd is gratified to learn that among
the victims thrown to the beasts is a man of some
distinction among the people called Christians.

We pass to the year 177, and to the province of
Gaul along the Rhone. There has been an anti-
Christian mob outbreak. Houses have been plun
dered, and many Christians thrown into prison to
await the governor's arrival for their trial. Some
slaves under torture are said to have confessed that
Christians perpetrate vile abominations, so no cruel
ties are felt to be severe enough to inflict upon them.
Vettius Epagathus offers to plead, but is promptly
added to the number of prisoners. One of the Chris
tians in prison named Alcibiades has been an ascetic,
living on only bread and water, and in confinement
he wishes to continue his habit. But Attalus, another
Christian, receives a revelation that it is not well to
decline to use the creatures of God, and with a
beautiful freedom from spiritual pride, Alcibiades
begins to partake of all things and gives thanks to
God. The first batch of martyrs suffers trial and
torture, and ten relapse, but these are not released.
Foremost among those who endure are Sanctus the
deacon, Maturus a new convert, Attalus of JPerga-
mus, and Blandina a slave girl, for there is no class

78 The Ancient Church and Modern India

distinction among Christians suffering for their faith.
Blandina's Christian mistress has feared lest the girl
should give way, but from morning till night Blan-
dina endures tortures till the executioners can think
of nothing fresh to do to her. After the first public
trial there follow many long days in the stocks in a
dark prison, where the aged Bishop Pothinus dies.
Some of the Christians who are Roman citizens
appeal to Caesar, the philosopher Emperor Marcus
Aurelius. His reply is clear; Roman citizens are to
be beheaded, renegades to be set free, the rest thrown
to the beasts. There follows another exhibition in
the amphitheatre, with ghastly tortures inflicted be
fore the prisoners are thrown to the beasts. The frail
slave-girl survives unshaken to the last, and in the
words of the moving letter written by the Church,
" she like a noble mother who had cheered on her
children, and sent them victorious to their king . . .
hasted to them with joy and exultation as though
they were bidden to a marriage feast, and not con
demned to be cast to wild beasts."

3. Failures of Courage.

But the Christians of the first three centuries were
not all heroes of the faith. Strange scenes were wit
nessed in the year 250, when after a peace for the
Church, which in most places had lasted for thirty
years, there fell like a thunderbolt the edict of Decius
that every person in the Empire must appear on a
fixed day with a crown on the head, to join in offer
ing the prescribed sacrifice of thanksgiving to the
gods for victory over the Goths and for an abundant

Suffering for Christ 79

harvest. Systematically the officers of Government
went through lists of the names of citizens, not ex
cluding women and boys, to compel everyone to
sacrifice. Many of the leaders of the Church were
added to the noble army of martyrs, but thousands
found that their courage failed them. Some boldly
and firmly denied that they were, or ever had been,
Christians. Others sacrificed with pale faces and
trembling hands amid the jeers of the crowd which
knew their past. Still others bribed corrupt officials
to grant them false certificates of having sacrificed; a
few specimens of those sorry documents still exist.
But the fire of the furnace left a smaller Church of
purer gold. In spite of the surrender of thousands,
the total result of the persecution was a demonstra
tion of the moral power of the religion of Christ.
Within a year Decius had to leave Rome for a
campaign against the Goths, from which he never
returned, and the fact that the persecution of the
Christians at once died down shows that public
opinion was not really behind it. Most men were
coming to know that Christians were not the vile
people their calumniators said they were.

4. Impression upon Non-Christians.

Of course, those who saw them suffer were not
all impressed in the same way, but even their worst
enemies were greatly puzzled. The satirist, Lucian,
who seems to have himself witnessed a persecution,
got the impression that Christians were very gullible
and very harmless people, led astray by the prepos
terous notion of personal immortality. " For the

8o The Ancient Church and Modern India

poor wretches have convinced themselves that they
will be absolutely immortal, and live for ever, and in
consideration of this they despise death, and com
monly offer themselves of their own accord for mar
tyrdom; and besides this their first lawgiver per
suaded them that they are all brethren when once
they have transgressed and denied the gods of Greece,
and pay worship to their crucified sophist, and live
according to His laws." A different type of man
was the soldier Basilides, who in Alexandria had to
lead forth the beautiful Potamiaena to an agonizing
death, and under the influence of what he saw be
came a Christian and a martyr himself, soon to be
followed by others also. Again in Eumenea, when
two Christian men were being crucified, a woman,
Agathonice, rushed forward and laid herself on a
cross to be nailed next. And as we read the most
exquisite of all the martyr records, the story of the
death in Africa in 203 of Perpetua and Felicitas,
written up to the last hours by Perpetua herself, and
probably finished by Tertullian; as we read in the
light of it many a burning word in Tertullian's other
writings, we know that one of the chief things which
brought that stern lawyer to the religion of Christ
was what he had seen of how Christians suffered. He
was uttering his own experience as well as a general
truth when he wrote that " The blood of the Chris
tians is seed."

5. The Final Victory.

At the beginning of the fourth century one more
deluge of suffering swept over the Church in the last

Suffering for Christ 8 1

general persecution under Diocletian. In the East
the cruelties were worse than ever; the lowest side of
paganism made its final frontal attack on Christian
endurance, and part of the story will scarcely bear
telling. Again there were some who apostatized,
and some who compromised, but the mass of Chris
tians simply wore out the persecution by their
endurance. The edict of Milan in 313 " that every
one of those who are agreed in desiring to observe
the Christian religion shall observe the same with
out any trouble or annoyance " signalized an amaz
ing victory^of suffering over cruelty, and inaugurated
a new era in the history of the world. No wonder
the young deacon Athanasius, who had lived in youth
and early manhood through some of the worst
horrors of the persecution, felt that the world had
become new, and wrote as if he sang in exultation :
" The powers of sin are overthrown. The old fear
of death is gone. Our children tread it underfoot,
our women mock at it. ... Heathenism is fallen, the
wisdom of the world is turned to folly, the oracles
are dumb, the demons are confounded. The works
of Christ are more in number than the sea, his vic
tories are countless as the waves, his presence is
brighter than the sunlight."

6. Suffering for Christ In India.

India has had her Christian martyrs, though for
the most part their stories are little known. In the
Indian Mutiny there were Christians who died
rather than abandon their faith. The social systems
of India are as inevitably opposed to Christianity as

82 The Ancient Church and Modern India

were the State systems of Rome, with the conse
quence that many a convert from the higher castes
has lost his life. It is less dramatic to be done to
death by a secret poison mixed with food than to be
slain before vast crowds in an amphitheatre, but it is
martyrdom as true. It is trying to be constantly
passed over when promotions are being made in
one's office, but it occasionally happens to Christian
men, and not because of their incapacity. It is hard
to be a pariah sent to prison ostensibly for sheep-
stealing, but really for joining the foreign mission.
Suffering enough is being endured in quiet ways
even now to prevent the Church in India from grow
ing entirely slack. The future is hidden from our
eyes, but there are men of experience who hold that
the Church should prepare herself for periods of
popular disfavour, and perhaps of active persecution
before many years have passed away. The convic
tion may here be set down that if such days come
again, while there will be numerous failures, as there
were long ago, there will also be joyful surprises in
the bearing of Christians now considered unsatisfac
tory, and most will not hesitate to die rather than
forsake their Lord. No country has exalted the
passive virtues more than India, and the spirit of
Christ joined to the spirit of India's past should pro
duce the stuff of which martyrs are made. Should
such dark days befall her, the Church of India may
hear from the ancient stories a full choir of witnesses
that suffering is one of the divine ways of the propa
gation of spiritual life. For her, too, will come the
day when some Indian Athanasius will rejoice in the

Suffering for Christ 83

fall of all evil powers, through the victories of Christ
more numerous than the waves, and His presence
brighter than the sunlight.

CHAPTER VI.

GLIMPSES OF EARLY CHRISTIAN LIFE.

EVERY authentic document from the early
centuries serves as a window through which we
can look into the lives led by Christian people long
ago. This chapter tries to call attention to a few of
the things which thus we see.

i. Early Christian Bhakti (The Odes of Solomon).

Except for a few good Christian lyrics, Christian
piety in India has hitherto mostly expressed itself
in forms borrowed either from the Bible or from
Church services which have come from the West,
and this has contributed to the unnecessarily
Western appearance of Christianity. For that
reason there is a special interest in a book of Chris
tian Psalms recently discovered by Dr. Rendel
Harris, in which we see how a Christian Jew of the
sub-Apostolic age, living, perhaps, in the last
quarter of the first century, gave voice to the devo
tion of his heart. These Psalms, called " The Odes
of Solomon," date back from that early time when
a Jewish Christian still felt it necessary to defend the
admission of Gentiles into the Church. In Ode 10
Christ or His Church is the speaker, and says almost
with a note of apology, " The Gentiles were
gathered together who were scattered abroad. And

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 85

I was unpolluted by my love. . . . They became
my people for ever and ever."

Whoever reads these fervent spiritual songs knows
what we sometimes forget, that Christian devotion
is no specially European product. There is more
of the East than of the West in the imagery used
in such praises as the following : —

" I became like the land which blossoms and
rejoices in its fruits, and the Lord was like the sun
shining on the face of the land; He lightened my
eyes and my face received the dew; and my nostrils
enjoyed the pleasant odour of the Lord." (Ode n.)

" As the wings of doves over their nestlings; and
the mouth of their nestlings toward their mouths,
so also are the wings of the Spirit over my heart;
my heart is delighted and exults; like the babe who
leaps in the womb of his mother; I believed, there
fore I was at rest : for faithful is He in whom I have
believed; He hath richly blessed me and my head
is with Him; and the sword shall not divide me from
Him, nor the scimitar." (Ode 28.)

" As the honey distils from the comb of the bees,
and the milk flows from the woman that loves her
children, so also is my hope on Thee, my God. As
the fountain gushes out its water, so my heart gushes
out the praise of the Lord, and my lips utter praise
to Him, and my tongue His psalms." (Ode 40.)

More wonderful than the imagery is the sustained
note of joy in the Lord. Every psalm ends with
" Hallelujah," and the end is in harmony with each
sentence. Never is there a trace of that pathetic
occasional reaction from faith to uncertainty, from

86 The Ancient Church and Modern India

ecstasy to despair, which is so familiar in Hindu
devotional literature. Here is a religious experience
which sings in the sunlight of God's love. Its ruling
motive is the grateful sense of what God has done
in Christ. " The greatness of His kindness hath
humbled me. He became like me, in order that I
might receive Him; He was reckoned like myself
in order that I might put Him on. They who
make songs shall sing the grace of the Lord Most
High, and they shall bring their songs, and their
heart shall be like the day, and like the excellent
beauty of the Lord their pleasant song." (Ode 7.)
" Thou hast given us Thy fellowship; it was not that
Thou wast in need of us, but that we are in need of
Thee. Distil Thy dews upon us and open Thy rich
fountains that pour forth to us milk and honey."
This is true bhaktl literature, but the bhakti is
Christian.

The bhakti literature of Hinduism, with such
psalms as those of the Maratha Vaishnavites or the
Tamil Saivites, has played a noble part in the spiritual
life of India. The best piety in those psalms will
be heightened, not lost, when India opens her long
hungry heart to the Christ who came not to destroy
but to fulfil. All their intensity of devotion, all
their indefinable charm of Eastern self-expression,
will find increased scope in working upon a worthier
subject. The Maratha Christayan of the late
N. V. Tilak and the Tamil Rakshanya Yattiriham
of the late Krishnan Pillay give a foretaste of what
we may look for. The self-abandoning love which
has poured itself out so lavishly before some imper-

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 87

feet representation of deity will not be destroyed but
set free, in adoration of the Perfect Man. It will
be a stronger, wiser, purer love, when it is the heart's
response to the God whose prior and perfect love is
seen in the Cross of Christ. Then instead of
borrowing hymns from the West, Indian Christianity
will sing such praises as may kindle the fervour of
Christ's devotees wherever His name is known.

2. Care for distant Churches.

Imagine that instead of giving a list of various
Churches and Missions we could naturally and
simply speak of the " Church in Calcutta " or the
" Church in Madras." Suppose again that danger
ous disorders have broken out in the " Church in
Calcutta," threatening all ordered life and all
spiritual efficiency. Suppose that at the same time
" the Church in Madras " is passing through the
fiery trial of persecution, and some of its members,
men and women, have gone through bloodshed and
torture into the glory of their Lord. It requires
some slight effort to imagine finally that instead of
being preoccupied with its own dangers and losses,
" the Church in Madras " meets together in deep
concern about " the Church in Calcutta," arranges
for a long letter to be written to that Church in its
name, and sends three special messengers to convey
the letter and report the result of it on their return.
That is approximately the state of affairs reflected in
the noble writing known as the first Epistle of St.
Clement of Rome to the Corinthians. Clement
wrote it, but entirely as a Church Secretary writes in

88 The Ancient Church and Modern India

the name of his Church. The Christians at Corinth
were being divided by a feud, and had unlawfully
deposed their presbyters. The Church at Rome was
undergoing cruel persecution under Domitian in the
year A.D. 95. But it could not leave the Church at
Corinth to fall to pieces in faction, so without any
undue interference or assumption of authority it took
action which must have gone far to put matters right,
though we have no information about the result.
So one day a large house in Corinth was filled with
Christian brethren gathered to listen to Clement's
letter as once they had listened to shorter letters
from St. Paul. Some passages in the letter throw
light on what a Church in those days could be at its
best. Reminding the Corinthians of what had been
before the present trouble, the writer tells how they
had cared for each other. " Ye had conflict day and
night for all the brotherhood. ... Ye were sincere
and simple and free from malice one towards another.
... Ye mourned over the transgressions of your
neighbours : ye judged their transgressions to be
your own." That was part of the hall-mark of early
Church life; to lose it would be fatal. " Who, there
fore, is noble among you? Who is compassionate?
Who is fulfilled with love? Let him say: If by
reason of me there be faction and strife and divisions,
I retire, I depart whither ye will, and I do that which
is ordered by the people : only let the flock of Christ
be at peace with its duly appointed presbyters. He
that shall have done this, shall win for himself great
renown in Christ, and every place will receive him."
Very startling is the statement made in passing that

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 89

Christians have actually been known to sell them
selves into slavery in order to help others. " We
know that many among ourselves have delivered
themselves into bondage, that they might ransom
others. Many have sold themselves into slavery,
and receiving the price paid for themselves have fed
others."

A beautiful example is given of the kind of prayer
which the Church used to offer up, with these words
in the midst of it : — " Save those among us who are
in tribulation; have mercy on the lowly; lift up the
fallen; show Thyself unto the needy; heal the
ungodly; release our prisoners; raise up the weak;
comfort the faint-hearted. Let all the Gentiles know
that Thou art God alone, and Jesus Christ is Thy
Son, and we are Thy people and the sheep of Thy
pasture." And through the whole letter, which
fills thirty ordinary close-printed pages, there pulses
a religious life of equal elevation and forcefulness.

The author's longing for order in the Church at
Corinth is rooted in his reverent sense of the order
in God's created handiwork. His exhortations to
love are, in the true Pauline way, based on the sense
of the love which the Master has shown in His death
for us all. There was as yet no fixed New Testament
Canon, but this letter contains abundant evidence
that the Holy Spirit was guiding the Church aright.
It deserves to be read and pondered in India, where
the Church of Christ lies as seriously exposed to the
danger of faction as anywhere else in the world.

90 The Ancient Church and Modern India

3. The Commonplace Man who Became a Prophet

(Hennas).

A slave named Hermas gained his freedom, and
seems to have kept a shop, where business pressure
made him no more truthtul than other shopkeepers.
Nor was he quite free from other more fleshly weak
ness. He was married and had children, but his
home was utterly unhappy. His wife was notorious
for evil speaking; his children out of sheer greed for
his property denounced him to the authorities as a
Christian. His property was confiscated, and he was
reduced to poverty, but the children gained nothing
save the reward for denouncing him, which they soon
squandered. Such was the commonplace man who
after all these troubles attained in penitence the gift
of seeing visions and prophesying. Probably we
must think of him as one of the " prophets " whose
function is referred to in the New Testament. He
became a kind of Christian yogi, who fasted much,
and occasionally fell into a trance, in which he saw
things which he felt were given him for the Church,
and which he wrote down in a book called The
Shepherd, between A.D. no and 140. It is in three
parts : first Visions, second Mandates or Command
ments, and third Similitudes or Parables. It has
been called the Pilgrim's Progress of the early
Church, and narrowly escaped becoming part of our
Christian Bible. In the Visions an aged lady who is
the Church tells him many things, growing younger
and fairer in each vision as Hermas more truly
repents of his sins. The twelve Mandates are exhor
tations on Christian duty, spoken to Hermas by the

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 91

Shepherd, who is explained to be the Angel of
Repentance. The Similitudes are a striking series
of parables. Repentance and confession is the con
stantly recurring theme. Hermas is an important
man in the Christian community, yet before the
whole Church he publicly acknowledges his sins, and
with a moral earnestness born of painful private
experience insistently calls on his fellow Christians
to repent. He harps too continually upon the minor
chord of confession, so that in one passage he is told
to stop confessing his sins and to go on to pray for
righteousness. His besetting weakness is double-
mindedness, the hesitating, wavering spirit of timidity,
that destroys faith and depresses the spiritual life.
Christianity, he is told, is a cheerful religion. " The
spirit of God endureth not sadness, neither constraint.
Therefore clothe thyself in cheerfulness, which hath
favour with God always and is acceptable to Him,
and rejoice in it." The ideal set before him is the
joyful whole-heartedness that can gladly take all risks
with Christ. But Hermas is so obsessed with the
thought of punishment that he does not enter into
the full freedom of the gospel. His Christianity is
of the kind only too often represented to-day in
India, a new law, stricter than that of Moses. He
has even his own theory of mortification of the flesh,
in which the man who fasts is gaining for himself
abundant glory, just as the man who is self-indulgent
is laying up for himself an exactly proportioned
store of pain. Seeds are here which later sprang up
in a whole harvest of ideas concerning merit and
purgatory.

92 The Ancient Church and Modern India

But the most notable thing in the book is its
revelation of the power of Christ upon a common
life. We see an average, faulty, timid man being
slowly transformed into a character good and glad
and strong; a hesitating spirit learning to be whole
hearted and fearless through the indwelling spirit of
Christ. Hermas has his counterparts in India, as in
all lands — ordinary weak men who stay too long at
the level of miserably confessing " we are but
wretched worms and insects in Thy sight." His
legalistic views of religion are sometimes echoed
among us, and the idea of merit is too firmly rooted
in India for us to escape from it with ease. But the
Spirit which transformed him is ours, and men can
see visions still.

4. Christians as the Soul of 'the World (The Epistle

to Diognetus).

In a non-Christian country what is the ideal rela
tionship of the Christian to the society round about
him ? Should he be as detached from it as possible,
making even his manner of dressing, or the way in
which he cuts his hair, his little tricks of speech, or
the pronunciation of his name, a continual reminder
that he belongs to a community apart? Are these
things necessary if he is to be faithful to his colours,
letting all the world everywhere know that he is a
Christian ? If these things are not necessary, if in
all externals he is to be just like the non-Christians
around him, how will the real inward difference of
his spirit find expression ? These are real and prac
tical problems which every Christian has to work out

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 93

in terms of his own particular environment. But
the ideal for us to strive after has perhaps never been
more clearly set forth than by some unknown writer
in the second century in his Epistle to Diognetus.
His words are too good to be condensed or para
phrased :

" For Christians are not distinguished from
the rest of mankind either in locality or in
speech or in customs. For they dwell not some
where in cities of their own, neither do they use
some different language, nor practise an extraordinary
kind of life. Nor again do they possess any inven
tion discovered by any intelligence of study of
ingenious men, nor are they masters of any human
dogma as some are. But while they dwell in cities
of Greeks and barbarians as the lot of each is cast,
and follow the native customs in dress and food and
the other arrangements of life, yet the constitution
of their own citizenship, which they set forth, is
marvellous, and confessedly contradicts expectation.
They dwell in their own countries, but only as
sojourners; they bear their share in all things as
citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers.
Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and
every fatherland is foreign. They marry like all
other men, and they beget children; but they do not
cast away their offspring. They have their meals in
common, but not their wives. They find themselves
in the flesh, and yet they live not after the flesh.
Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in
heaven. They obey the established laws, and they
surpass the laws in their own lives. They love all

94 The Ancient Church and Modern India

men, and they are persecuted by all. They are in
beggary, and yet they make many rich. They are
in want of all things, and yet they abound in all
things. . . .

" In a word, what the soul is in a body, this the
Christians are in the world. The soul hath its abode
in the body, and yet it is not of the body. So Chris
tians have their abode in the world, and yet they are
not of the world. The soul, which is invisible, is
guarded in the body which is visible : so Christians
are recognized as being in the world, and yet the
religion remaineth invisible. The flesh hateth the
soul, and wageth war with it, though it receiveth no
wrong, because it is forbidden to indulge in pleasures;
so the world hateth Christians, though it receiveth
no wrong from them, because they set themselves
against its pleasures. The soul loveth the flesh
which hateth it, and the members : so Christians love
those that hate them."

Could we imagine a better ideal for Christians in
relation to the new India which is coming into being ?

Not to form a separated community, or an isolated
religious caste, but to permeate the life of India as
its real soul, that is the call that comes to us across
seventeen centuries of time.

5. The Reconciliation of Faith and Culture.
(Clement of Alexandria^)

We are saved by faith, not by knowledge. In a
country such as Greece or India, where philosophy
has caused an over-estimation of knowledge, Chris
tianity in its beginnings is by reaction likely to try

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 95

to right the balance by a suspicious attitude towards
the intellect. The early Church, after its experiences
with Gnosticism, had good reason for being careful
about what was called knowledge, for it had led
many Christians away from faith. It would not have
been surprising had the Church repudiated know
ledge altogether, yet it would have done so to its
permanent loss, since fearless pursuit of truth in
every form is one of the fruits of faith in the God of
truth. That faith is like a childless wife until it has
had both knowledge and works for offspring. Not
only would the ancient Church have suffered
impoverishment in its own life, but it would have
weakened its own power of missionary appeal to men
of intellect outside the Church, who knew in their
own experience that knowledge was a jewel not to be
lightly thrown away. In such a university centre
as Alexandria a Christianity which could find no
proper place for knowledge would have lost most of
its power to attract. The Church in India has as
much reason to be careful about gnanam as had the
early Church to be careful about gnosis. But it has
also as much to lose, in self-impoverishment and in
loss of missionary magnetism, by complete repudia
tion of knowledge. The position is somewhat
similar with regard to lesser matters such as worldly
possessions or social rank. At the very beginning
most Christians had very little of these, and in a
rightful fear of worldliness they set them at naught.
But in course of time as the religion of Christ pene
trated all social grades, the question of finding the
proper place for wealth, neither repudiating its

cj6 The Ancient Church and Modern India

rightful uses, nor falling under the mastery of its
" deceitfulness," became a very practical one. There
were sections of Christian society in Alexandria near
the end of the second century which were in serious
danger from too much luxury, from a life with
scented baths and o-olden eating vessels. Was it
possible to be a faithful, humble Christian, at the same
time making a proper use of moderate wealth, and
rejoicing in the best products of art and culture ?

We can see the problem being solved in the person
of Clement of Alexandria, the Greek scholar and
gentleman and simple Christian believer. Born
probably of pagan parents in Athens about the middle
of the second century, he had studied Greek
philosophy and saturated himself with Greek litera
ture. He had been initiated into the Greek religious
mysteries, had studied Jewish thought, and even
mentions Indian hermits, Brahmans, and Buddhists.
He wandered far in quest of truth, ever unsatisfied
until he found peace in the religion of Christ as
taught him by Pantaenus. We have already seen
(Chap. IV) how he rejoiced in the light shed by the
Word beyond the limits of Christianity, showing its
rays all derived from Christ their Sun; and how he
could use the Greek myths he loved to set forth the
gospel which he loved yet more. His was piety of
the buoyant and gladsome type, so vital and appli
cable to all ages that a hymn which he wrote for chil
dren is still to be found in our hymn-books. One of
his works is a complete guide to Christian manners
in a complicated society sometimes vulgarly ostenta
tious of wealth. It goes into interesting detail as to

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 97

what a Christian should eat or drink, what kind of
vessels he should use, what kind of laughter he
should indulge in (" Man is not to laugh on all
occasions because he is a laughing animal, any more
than the horse neighs on all occasions because it is a
neighing animal"); how and how much he should
talk ("It is with triflers as with old shoes, all the rest is
worn away by evil; only the tongue is left"); and what
should be his general deportment (" Cultivate quiet
ness in word, quietness in deed, likewise in speech
and gait; and avoid impetuous eagerness "). The
longest of his books is called Stromateis, which in
India might be translated " bed-bundles," " from the
haphazard way in which things came into my mind,
not clarified either by arrangement or style, but
mingled together in a studied disorder." It is
indeed a variegated medley, a hodge-podge of
thoughts from many sources, some of them far too
full of Greek philosophical abstractions for our
liking, but with gems of truth glittering among the
mass. What is of special interest in our present con
nection is that Clement, in spite of the controversy
with Gnosticism, is not afraid to sketch his ideal
character as a Gnostic Christian, one who through
faith has attained to knowledge of true wisdom. The
real Christian cannot be scared of human learning.
" The way of truth is one, and into it as a never-
failing river flow the streams on either side."
Philosophy was given to the Greeks as the Law was
given to the Jews, as a preparation for Christ; so it
ought to be possible to present the religion of Christ
as philosophy's crown. The ideal Christian must be

98 The Ancient Church and Modern India

a man of learning. In short, as a French writer has
said, " Clement is at once the firmest of believers
and the most inquisitive and independent spirit that
has perhaps ever appeared in the Church."*

His spiritual inheritors in India will love the
treasures of their people's past in literature, philo
sophy, and religion, and show them as a preparation
for Christ. They will work out a detailed Christian
way of living for the well-to-do as well as for the
mass-movement convert, in the midst of the com
plications of society in modern India. They will
bring to light the intellectual implications of their
faith, and set forth Christ as the truth as well as the
way, to the learned as well as to the ignorant. And
their own walk in simple trust will all the time pro
claim Him as the life.

6. The Vakil who pleaded for Christianity.
(Tertullian.)

While Clement was teaching in Alexandria, a very
different man was practising law in Carthage. The
son of a pagan Roman centurion in North Africa,
Tertullian grew up as a man of wide reading and
classical culture and was trained as a lawyer, for that
purpose spending some time in the study of rhetoric
in Rome, where probably he lived the dissolute life
of the pagan young men of the period. He despised
rhetoric, but no one could surpass him in the use of
it, while his studies in law left their mark on all his
subsequent thought. He had probably just begun

* de Faye, Clement d' Alexandria, Paris, 1898.

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 99

practising his profession in Carthage when on July
1 7th, 1 80, six Christians from Scili were brought
up for trial, and after a proud confession of their
faith were condemned to the sword. It is more than
likely that the bearing of those martyrs was what
first set the young lawyer's mind working upon the
problem of its cause. At any rate, in the next per
secution, seventeen years later, Tertullian was a
Christian, " all out " for the religion of Christ,
writing three brilliant books in its defence. Some
five years later he probably finished the pathetic story
of the death of Perpetua and of Felicitas; while
fifteen years later he championed the Christian cause
in an open letter to Scapula, the proconsul of the
province. Think ctf the courage that inspired the
writing of those books. Tertullian had seen Chris
tians slowly done to death; he knew every instru
ment used for their torture; again and again some
thing about the sufferings of Christians in the midst
of one of his arguments can set the reader's nerves
a-quiver. He knew precisely the danger he was
incurring. Tertullian the lawyer's address was
known to anyone who cared to serve as informer in
the courts. His turn might come at any moment.
But he published his writings, stayed where he was,
and took all risks. And his main defence of Chris
tianity was unanswerable. There are intolerant and
unsympathetic, even ferocious passages, which we
could not use to-day, but we are not likely to find
ourselves to-day in his situation. What we must
not miss is the glorious fearlessness that scorned
compromise in a position exposed to all that was
H

ioo The Ancient Church and Modern India

most terrible to a sensitive nature like Tertullian's.
He was always the man who made his choice, was
in deadly earnest, and never compromised. That
spirit in his later years attracted him to the strict
sect of the Montanists, who at any rate took their
religion more seriously than the average Church-
m.ember. It joined with his legal training to make
him sometimes unfair to his opponents, more like
a pleader concerned to score every possible point in
the presentation of his case than like a seeker after
truth who looks at both sides of every question. But
that was the weakness of a noble concentration of
moral earnestness upon some one thing which at the
moment seemed right. His writings more than
those of anyone else in the period take us right back
into the circumstances in which they were written.
He may be describing life in prison, and what the
Christians made of it; or discussing whether Chris
tians might attend the shows in the amphitheatre; or
showing how impossible it was, in Tertullian's judg
ment, for a Christian to serve in the army. What
ever his subject, he gives the reader a sensation of
having been where Tertullian was and having felt
things. See, for instance, this account of the excite
ment at the games. " See the people coming to it
already under strong emotion, already tumultuous,
already passion-blind, already agitated about their
bets. The praetor is too slow for them; their eyes
are ever rolling, as though with the lots in his urn.
Then they all hang eager on the signal; there is the
united shout of a common madness. Observe how
' out of themselves ' they are by their foolish

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 101

speeches. c He has thrown it!' they exclaim, and
they announce, each one to his neighbour, what all
have seen."

Practical Christian ethics are his chief interest,
and here as ever his conclusions are stern. Society
is too tainted with idolatry for the Christian to have
much contact with it. No Christian may be a
soldier; no Christian may hold any public office; no
Christian may take any kind of oath; no Christian
may make things which are likely to be used in idol-
worship; no Christian may teach literature. One
gets the impression that Christians have small chance
of earning a livelihood, but Tertullian cares little
for that so long as they are pure of idolatrous stains.
" None of them whom the Lord chose to Him said,
cl have 110 means to live.' Faith fears not famine."
With his gift of vivid presentation goes the gift
of coining terms and making phrases. Most of the
technical terms of Latin theology begin with him;
and some of his phrases will always live in the Chris
tian Church.*

The blood of the martyrs is seed (Semen est
sanguis Christianorum).

The testimony of the human soul which is
naturally Christian (Testimonium anim<e naturaliter
Christian^).

Why debate? God commands (Quid revolvis?
Deus praecipit).

Christ our Master called Himself Truth, not Con
vention (Dominus noster Christus veritatem se non
ccnsuetudinem cognominavit).

* cf. T. R. Glover, Conflict of Religions, p. 321.

io2 The Ancient Church and Modern India

Faith is patience with its lamp lit (Fides patientia
in luminata).

In the controversies in which he was engaged, and
they were many, Tertullian was frequently on the
side which we now know to be mistaken. But the
man stands out always better than his teaching. Dr.
Glover has helped us in these days to see the real
Tertullian, and we must borrow his words. " By
his expression of Christian ideas in the natural
language of Roman thought, by his insistence on
the reality of the historic Jesus and on the inevit
able consequences of human conduct, by his refer
ence of all matters of life and conduct to the will
of God manifested in nature, in inspiration, and in
experience, Tertullian laid Western Christendom
under a great debt never very generously acknow
ledged. To us it may be as profitable to go behind
the writings till we find the man, and to think of the
manhood with every power and every endowment,
sensibility, imagination, energy, flung with passion
ate enthusiasm on the side of purity and righteous
ness, of God and Truth; to think of the silent self-
sacrifice freely and generously made for a despised
cause, of a life-long readiness for martyrdom, of a
spirit unable to compromise, unable in its love of
Christ to see His work undone by cowardice,
indulgence, and unfaith, and of a nature in all its
fulness surrendered."*

India can do without the men who seem so broad-
minded and are really so vacillating or pusillanimous
that they never take a stand for any faith. But he

* T. R. Glover, Conflict of Religions, p. 347.

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 103

whose boldness of attitude like Tertullian's is con
tinually saying, " Here I stand, this truth I will
never forsake; you may disgrace me, make me poor,
kill me, but you cannot make me conceal my faith,"
that man can do for Christ's cause in India service
as precious as that of Tertullian for the Latin Church.

7. The Ascetic and Theologian (Origen).

India has always glorified asceticism, and in a
Christianity which is fully indigenous there can be
little doubt that room will be found for that type
of Christian living which, while free from the pagan
notion that the body is necessarily evil, is deter
mined to keep the body in full subjection to the
spirit. The more Christian is the asceticism the
less its emphasis will fall on bodily austerities, and
the more on exaltation of the intellectual and the
spiritual. The Christian man who combines
austerity of daily life with learning and saintliness
will be a powerful magnet in India. The Church has
had such men in other lands, but none greater than
Origen, Clement's greater successor in Alexandria.
Like most of the early Christians, he bore a heathen
name, which mean's " child of Hor," the god of the
river Nile. One wonders whether he was a man of
half colour. His father died as a Christian martyr
while Origen was still a youth. His own zeal was
such that only his mother's ingenuity prevented him
from going to death with his father. After the
persecution he was appointed Clement's successor as
head of the Catechetical School. He wanted at all
costs to have time for study, so he sold his books

104 The Ancient Church and Modern India

and costly manuscripts, and with the proceeds secured
an income about equal to a coolie's daily wage, on
which he lived for many years. He slept only on
the floor, and for a measured number of hours, fasted
much, and wore no sandals but went barefoot. In
one matter excessive literalism combined with
asceticism to lead him into the grave mistake of
mutilating himself in supposed obedience to
Matthew xix. 12, a mistake which reduced his
influence in later life, but which at any rate shows
his determination and recklessness of personal
suffering. In the midst of days crowded with
teaching and study he found time to attend lectures
on Greek philosophy, and to study the sciences and
also Hebrew. Biblical studies were his main
interest, and he was the first Christian scholar to
realize the value of recovering the exact text of
Scripture. The methods which Greek scholars in
Alexandria were using to correct the manuscripts of
Homer he skilfully applied to the Christian sacred
books, and his inspiration fired scholars for genera
tions later to carry forward the work of pious learn
ing which he began.

Teaching, studying, writing, preaching, he exerted
ffti influence which gradually spread through many
countries. A rich friend and pupil supplied him
with shorthand writers to take down books at his
dictation, which accounts for the large number of his
works. Royal persons corresponded with him, and
once he journeyed to Arabia to combat a new heresy.
Ecclesiastical jealousy in 232 drove him from
Alexandria to Caesarea, where he taught and wrote,

Glimpses of Early Christian Life 105

and studied the topography of the Holy Land.
During the persecution of Decius, in spite of his
great age he was so severely tortured that after the
persecution was over he died in 254. He has never
been canonized, but few sons of the Church have
so richly deserved the title " Saint." His combina
tion of Christian asceticism, saintliness, and learning
is one which we may well hope to see distinguishing
some Indian Christian who may follow in his steps.

Conclusion.

The Christian life which was being lived in
different parts of the Roman Empire in the first
three centuries of our era was infinitely variegated;
and these few conspicuous examples are given as half-
a-dozen leaves might be shown as specimens of the
trees in a vast forest. There is scope for every one
of these forms of Christian living in India to-day
and for many another form beside. We commonly
think far too narrowly of the Christian life, and we
do ourselves grave wrong when we mistake it for
some dull round of Church-going and moralism.
It has shown itself capable of infinite adaptability
to soils Eastern and Western, and has produced
flowers of human excellence as varied as the flora
of many lands. And when the religious heart of
India is given to Jesus Christ the Divine Guru, there
will spring up in Indian lives such many-hued flowers
of varied perfumes as will make a very garden of the
Lord.

CHAPTER VII.

SOCIAL EFFECTS OF CHRISTIANITY, THEN AND Now

THE early Christians did not set out to do what
we call " Social Service." Their expectation
of the impending second advent and the end of the
whole present order of things for long weakened
their interest in the affairs of the non-Christian
society around them. They felt themselves to be
standing at the bedside of a dying world, so that
efforts to mitigate or cure social diseases could hardly
seem worth while. Yet their whole religion was
intensely social, and as the years passed on its
inherent nature could not fail to produce results. The
conception of God as holy Father of mankind, so
different from the old state-gods whose concern was
only the victory or defeat of the nation which they
patronized, or the gods of gain who made bargains
with worshippers, or the gods of individual lust and
selfishness who made men immoral, inevitably altered
the conditions under which men had to live with
each other. The Kingdom of God is not so much
individual as social, an order of things in which the
will of the holy Father effectively prevails. The
distinctively Christian motive of conduct, grateful
love to God who has done so much for His own,
included the love of all God's children, each one of
whom, however despised and sinful, is of limitless
value as seen in relation to God. Here are truths

1 06

Social Effects of Christianity 107

which cannot fail to produce a new social order when
ever they find a lodgment in the minds of men. East
or West, the whole structure of human life begins
to change when every individual on the earth is seen
to have an infinite value as the child of a heavenly
Father whose character was revealed in the human
life of Jesus.

Consequently, in spite of the second advent
expectation, we find the New Testament Epistles full
of statements of principles on which a better social
order must be founded. Husbands, wives, children,
slaves, freemen, rich, poor, those who can show
hospitality, those who are unfairly treated — all kinds
of people are told how to live together, and the
principles laid down are those upon which the best
kind of human society has yet to be built up. In
times like the present, when alike in India and all
over the world the old order is failing to satisfy,
those principles call for re-examination, that they may
be applied to present-day conditions.

In the light of that great need let us consider some
of the social results of the Christian religion in the
early centuries. We can most conveniently do this
under a few definite headings.

i. The Christian Religion and Poverty.

No one can despise or neglect the poor man who
realizes his infinite value in the sight of God; and
nothing is clearer than the respect and solicitude
shown for the poor by the early Christians. It
revolutionized their whole idea of property. A
man's possessions were not absolutely his, but held

io8 The Ancient Church and Modern India

in trust for all who were in need. Persons mattered
more than property, and the rights of any individual
to that which belonged to him were limited by the
general welfare of the whole community. Every
owner would have to give to God an account of how
far he had fulfilled his stewardship for the good of
all. Some references in Acts, taken apart from
others which interpret them, have been supposed
to mean that the first Christian Church instituted
a compulsory communism; but this is pure mistake.
There was no abolition of private property, but
there was insistence upon the duty of sharing with
those in need. When that sharing went to the point
of making large sacrifices of private property, as
in the case of Barnabas, such conduct was highly
praised. But the essential principle was that every
Christian should regard himself as a trustee rather
than an absolute owner of whatever he possessed.

Moreover the early Christians keenly felt the
danger to the individual of great worldly wealth.
Not only in the Epistle of James, but in such later
works as Clement of Alexandria's Who is the Rich
Man that is Saved? the perils of opulence are
clearly set forth, though Clement is careful to assure
the rich man that it is not impossible for him to win
the prize of Christian life. The characteristic
attitude is indicated in a passage from The Preach
ing of Peter, written in the first half of the second
century, and repeatedly quoted in the third and
fourth centuries.

" Understand then, ye rich, that ye are in duty
bound to do service, having received more than ye

Social Effects of Christianity 109

yourselves need. Learn that to others is lacking
that wherein you superabound. Be ashamed of
holding fast what belongs to others. Imitate God's
equity, and none shall be poor." Church leaders
indignantly denounced the lending of money to poor
borrowers at high rates of interest which held the
borrower in the lender's power, " Farming not the
land but the necessity of the needy. "*

How thoroughly the Church acted upon these
principles is seen in the single fact that in the middle
of the third century the Roman Church was actually
supporting 1,500 widows and poor persons. There
were cases where in times of emergency bishops sold
the sacred vessels and ornaments of Churches to help
the unfortunate. The whole institution of the order
of " widows," as a kind of subordinate clergy, was
a means of both caring for the widows themselves
and providing for the needs of the sick and the poor
whom they visited. If Christians were sent to
prison for their faith, the Church undertook to pro
vide for their needs. Even when they were sent to
work in mines at a distance, deacons went to their
assistance. Brethren who died in poverty were
buried out of the common fund of the Church.

With all this benevolence, the danger of pauperiza
tion was not overlooked. Alms were for those who
could not work; for those who could, employment
must be found. The rule, as expressed in the third
century Epistle of Clement to James, was " To
the workman work : to him who cannot work,
mercy " (i.e. alms).

* Gregory of Nazianzus, Orat. XVI, 18.

iio The Ancient Church and Modern India

Nor was almsgiving restricted to needy Christians.
Non-Christians shared in its benefits, and were
deeply impressed by it, as is evidenced by the pro
clamation in which the Emperor Julian, in his hatred
of Christianity, paid it the compliment of imitation,
bidding the pagan priests bestir themselves on behalf
of the poor. " It would be shameful when the Jews
have not a beggar, when the impious Galileans
nourish both ours and theirs, that those of our cult
should be deprived of the succour which we ought
to give them." One fine example of Christian
generosity to non-Christians is the case of the Bishop
of Amida, who in 420 sold the consecrated vessels
of his Church in order to ransom and send back in
freedom to their own country 7,000 Persians who
had been captured by the Roman army.*

In modern India the Church has to face a two
fold economic problem of very great difficulty. First,
although in India, as in the ancient Church, there
are a few Christians of wealth and position, the con
dition of the outcastes from whom the Christian
Church has so largely been recruited has produced
an average economic condition of Church members
probably lower than that of Christians anywhere
else in the world. And second, the economic condi
tions of life in India generally cause hardships for
vast numbers of people outside the Church which
Christians surely must try to mitigate. For both
sides of the problem the only possibility of solution
lies in faithful adherence to the fundamental social
ideals which conquered poverty in the early Christian

* Schmidt, Social Results of Early Christianity, p. 264.

Social Effects of Christianity 1 1 1

Church, the ideal of the inestimable worth of each
individual in God's sight, and of the trusteeship of
all property for the good of all.

Some things have already been accomplished. The
achievements of Christianity for the economic as
well as the moral betterment of the depressed classes
are admitted on all hands as not only remarkable, but
new in the history of India. While most of the
agencies employed have been set on foot by foreign
missions, by far the largest amount of the actual
work involved has been done by members of the
Indian Christian Church; and no small part of the
achievements must be set down to the credit of that
Church. Nevertheless what has hitherto been
accomplished is chiefly valuable as an indication of
the magnitude and beneficence of the results which
will follow when the Church at large makes war on
poverty as it once did long ago. The fear of
perpetuating a spirit of dependence, by giving too
generous help, may be justified as long as the help
continues to come from Churches in other lands;
but it is quite a needless fear when the Church in
India helps its own poor. Every form of charitable
practice in the life of the early Church could find
scope for its exercise in meeting the deep need of
Christians in India. And beyond the Christian
Church, millions of people find life scarcely tolerable
through insufficiency of food. Economists tell us
that India would have supplies enough for all her
population if they were distributed with anything
approaching equality. Here is a call for the pro
clamation of the Christian doctrine of the trusteeship

112 The Ancient Church and Modern India

of all property, and of the limitless value of the life
of even the neediest person on the earth.

2. The Christian Religion and Public Distress.

Probably no country in the world suffers quite so
frequently as India, or on so large a scale, from sweep
ing visitations of famine, or from plague, cholera,
and similar epidemic diseases. The ravages of the
influenza epidemic in 1918, when according to official
estimates India lost six million people in a few weeks,
are stated by competent officers to be without parallel
in the modern history of disease.

In most cases Christians have borne themselves
well in such times of crisis. Particularly in the relief
of famine, it has become an understood thing that
Christian organizations can be relied upon to do what
they can in the relief of distress, not only amongst
Christians but amongst the general public. And yet
it can hardly be said that the Christian Church has
yet realized that such crises are not mere calamities,
but opportunities for the demonstration to the world
of the essential spirit of the religion of Christ, the
spirit that cares for all sufferers, and seeks to serve
and save them regardless of risk to itself. The time
should come when such a visitation at once starts
the Church mobilizing all her resources in a campaign
against whatever threatens human life and happiness.
There will be no limitation of the available help to
members of the Christian community. Human need
will constitute sufficient claim upon the help which
Christian love can offer.

In the light of these considerations we have a

Social Effects of Christianity 113

special interest in the records of how the Christians
of the early Church conducted themselves in similar
circumstances. From time to time the Roman
Empire was swept by plague, with terrible loss of
life, especially in the middle of the third century and
at the beginning of the fourth. In Alexandria on
the former occasion we have a description of the
activities of the Christians amid scenes of death and
terror, written by their bishop Dionysius; it is not
the only piece of evidence of the kind.

" Indeed, the most of our brethren, by their
exceeding great love and brotherly affection,
not sparing themselves, held fast to each other,
visited the sick without fear, ministered to
them assiduously, and served them for the
sake of Christ. Right gladly did they perish
with them. . . . Indeed many did die after caring
for the sick and giving health to others, as it were
transplanting the death of others into themselves.
In this way the noblest of our brethren died, includ
ing some presbyters and deacons and people of the
highest reputation. . . . Quite the reverse was it
with the heathen. They abandoned those who began
to sicken, fled from their dearest friends, threw out
the skk when half dead into the streets, and let the
dead lie unburied."*

3. The Christian Religion and Slavery.

The worst feature of the civilization surrounding
the early Christian Church was that it was built up
upon slavery, a slavery so complete that it poisoned

* Eusebius, Bk. VII,'Chap. xxii.

ii4 The Ancient Church and Modern India

the life of the masters as well as of the slaves. Chris
tians seem to have given no thought to the institu
tion of slavery as such, beyond attributing it to the
Fall of man. The Church had too many other pre
occupations, and without attacking slavery was
already sufficiently suspected of hatred of the existing
order. But the principle of the value of each soul
in relation to the Fatherhood of God could not fail
to modify the working of the institution, and at long
last to abolish it altogether. It gave to the slave a
new dignity, so that his slavery was ho bar to his
holding office, or receiving the fullest reverence, in
the Christian Church. We know of one bishop in
Rome, Callistus, and possibly another, Hermas5
brother Pius, who had been slaves. Said Lactantius,
" Slaves are not slaves to us; we deem and term them
brothers after the spirit, and fellow servants in
religion " (Instit. V. 16).

Some of the martyrs whose sufferings most deeply
stirred the whole Church were slaves, but that made
no difference to the glory ascribed to them. In the
most pathetic of all the martyr stories, mistress and
slave woman faced death hand in hand in the absolute
equality of sisters. At that level of Christian
experience the profoundest gulf of social division
had ceased to exist.

India has other social divisions than those between
slave and freeman, divisions which must be bridged
before the best hopes of her children can be realized.
Programmes of social reform abound which plan
for the abolition of caste, for co-operation between
all communities, for the elimination of race prejudice

Social Effects of Christianity 115

and the promotion of more cordial intercourse
between the East and the West. The history of the
early days of Christianity in its linking together of
Jew and Gentile, slave and free, suggests that it has
a mighty contribution to make to the new life of
India. Thoughts of the one God and Father of all
mankind, of the best of all humanity summed up in
the one Son of Man, of the one Kingdom of God
as the divine social order transcending all boundaries
of class and race, and of the equal divine love
bestowed upon every individual whatever his human
status — such thoughts as these can do more to achieve
real unity than all the schemes of reform ever
promulgated. The Christian religion has already
shown itself to be the most powerful solvent of
caste and race prejudice yet discovered in India. The
highest offices of the Church are as open to those
who once were outcastes as long ago they were open
to slaves. A Christianity which is true to type
cannot fail to deal with caste and race 'divisions in
India as effectually as once it dealt with slavery in
the Roman Empire.

4. The Status of Woman.

In^the ancient Roman Republic women were in a
position in many respects similar to that of most
Indian women to-day. They were married at about
the age of twelve, regarded as inferiors, and kept in
life-long submission, first to fathers, then to
husbands, finally to sons; and Roman law gave them
very few rights at all. Under the Empire all this was
relaxed, but not on the ground of any constructive

1 1 6 The Ancient Church and Modern India

principles regarding womanhood or marriage. The
result was a terrible increase in divorce and immor
ality. Women were emancipated, but enslaved to
their own caprice or passion. Utterly different was
the position of woman in the Christian Church. It
is true that some of the Church Fathers, with their
celibate prejudice, said strong things of woman's
weakness and vanity. But these are more than
counterbalanced by such a saying as this of Augus
tine, " The Saviour gives abundant proof of the
dignity of woman in being born of a woman," or
this of Chrysostom, " They surpass us in love to
the Saviour, in chastity, in compassion for the miser
able." And it is the undoubted fact that women in
the Church were educated as carefully as men.

Whether we look at the services which women
rendered in the Christian Church, at the long lists
of women martyrs, or at the treatment of the married
life in early Christian books, we cannot fail to receive
the impression that, whatever might be the social
customs still persisting in the different countries into
which the religion penetrated — customs which as yet
made it impossible for women to perform public
functions in the Church — nevertheless woman as a
spiritual being was the absolute equal of man, as
fellow-heir with him of the grace of life. India
tells the same story over again. In a country where
child-marriage and the purdah system have prevailed
for ages past, the Christian women are treated as
the equals of the Christian men, receive equal educa
tion, are married at a reasonable age, and have equal
vote with men in the affairs of the Church. The

Social Effects of Christianity 117

Christian community is being continually flooded by
illiterate outcastes; yet, if we exclude the small and
select community of Parsees, in literacy the Chris
tian women head all other groups of women in India.
In Bengal, which has a population not far short of
that of Great Britain, there were in 1918 only 156
women in all the training institutions for women
teachers at every grade, and 92 of these were Indian
Christians. Such facts as these are symptomatic of
the special genius of the Christian religion for the
elevation of womanhood in every society. " As a
life-bringer alone has woman her place in the scheme
of Hindu philosophy — and woman never did have a
Vedic value."* That is why Hindu women to-day,
in spite of their wonderful spiritual capacities, are
mainly uneducated and still oppressed by evil
customs. In Christ there is neither male nor female,
but one new divine humanity. That is why Chris
tian women inevitably come to their own. Practically
every programme of social reform in India puts the
education and elevation of women as the first plank
in its platform. But a social order is built upon
spiritual ideas. Great progress will not be made
with educational schemes until new ideas of woman's
essential nature and value have been spread abroad.
And here the social reformer will find no ally so
strong as the Christian religion.

5. The Christian Religion and Family Life.

The Christian view of womanhood inevitably came
as a purifying influence into the life of the family.
* Cornelia Sorabji, Between the Twilights.

n8 The Ancient Church and Modern India

The weakest point in the whole social order of the
world in which the early Church grew up was the
corruption of family life. Old theories surviving
from the days of the republic made the head of the
family an absolute despot, with powers of life and
death over his own children. If his despotism was
cruel or immoral there was no remedy, and the
presence of slaves in the house encouraged him in
both cruelty and immorality. Childhood had no
claims to protection, and the father could choose
entirely whether he would bring up the child born
to him or expose it. The noble philosopher Seneca
defended the killing of weak and deformed infants.
The slave in the house had no rights against his
master. Even his marriage had no legal form, and
his wife was referred to as his " companion," while
the children belonged to his owner.

Conditions like these made real home-life impos
sible. Children were largely left to the care of
slaves, while their parents were pursuing profligate
amusement. Men and women alike lost self-
respect and mutual reverence, else the amphi
theatre shows of those days could not have been
tolerated.

Amid surroundings like these the Christian prin
ciple of the sanctity of each individual life through
its direct relationship to the holy Father, and the
Christian motive of all-compelling, grateful love,
brought into existence without conscious intention
a family life that was unknown to the rest of the
world. There was no attempt made to reconstruct
family systems, but the despotism of the head of the

Social Effects of Christianity 119

family was limited by love and purity; the married
relation had new sanctions and purer ideals; children
were the Lord's gift, to be brought up in the love
and fear of Him : slaves were men for whom Christ
died. The result could not fail to be impressive.
Not that family life became instantaneously perfect.
The glimpses of it which we get in literature show
that it was not entirely free from the surrounding
social evils, or sometimes from the old Roman stern
ness. But the Christian home had become a school
of moral discipline, and a scene of happy spiritual
fellowship, such as existed nowhere else.

Fortunately for India, there is no such general
widespread corruption of family life to form the back
ground of the expansion of Christianity. The life
of the average Hindu family is morally on a far
higher level than the life of the average pagan of
the Roman Empire of the second and third centuries
A.D. Nevertheless Christian family life has a great
part to play in the conversion of India to Christ,
because the Hindu home is necessarily weak at cer
tain points where the Christian home is strong. The
joint family system is not incompatible with Chris
tian living, but as practised in the Hindu family its
tendency is so far to merge the life of husband and
wife in the life of the larger patriarchal family to
which the husband belongs, that something is
missing of that joyful intimacy which grows up in
the house where mother, father, and children make
a home all to themselves. Still more unfortunate
from the point of view of home life is the terrible
disparity in education between husband and wife,

12O The Ancient Church and Modern India

making impossible any real community of ideas or
spiritual comradeship. When the schoolboy ten
years old cannot help being aware that he knows far
more than his mother, it is difficult for him to main
tain that respect which is an element in the best filial
love. Worst of all, if the theory of family life is
that it is a stage through which the complete man
must necessarily pass, but which he will leave behind
him in complete detachment and oblivion as he
climbs beyond it to the higher places of experience,
then domestic love and affection are no longer
symbols and sacraments of love divine, and the truest
sanctity of family life is gone. The difference
between -the spirit of Hinduism and that of Chris
tianity will be felt nowhere more strongly than in
matters connected with home life.

There are even now some homes in India where
husbands and wives are comrades, who can talk
together of all life's problems on equal terms; where
children have no fear of their parents, yet hold them
in loving respect; where earthly parenthood of both
mother and father makes no mean symbol of the
divine fatherhood; and where daily family prayer
links each day's events to the eternal throne of God.
Every such home interprets to the world something
of the relationships which ought to obtain in the
larger family of the divine Father; every such home
radiates healing influences throughout the whole
social order. That was a beautiful word of Clement
of Alexandria : " Who are the two or three gathering
in the name of Christ among whom the Lord is in the
midst? Does he not mean man, wife, and child by

Social Effects of Christianity 121

the three, seeing woman is made to match man by
God?"*

6. Christianity and Public Legislation.

Christianity came too late to save the Roman
Empire from dissolution. During the most critical
years it was a proscribed religion, only able to exert
a very indirect influence upon political authorities.
By the time that Christian Emperors had come into
power, able to publish decrees which would affect
the life of the entire population, the forces of disin
tegration which left the Empire at the mercy of the
Goths had gained control. The opportunity did not
come, nor has it come yet, for the foundation of a
completely Christian State, whose laws are consistent
expressions of the Christian principles. But the
religion of Christ was working as a powerful leaven,
and latterly, even in non-Christian circles.

At length, in A.D. 313, Christianity obtained by
the Edict of Toleration a new position in the
Empire, and an influence over public enactments
which it had never enjoyed before. Constantine
was no perfect Christian, but before all things a
statesman; yet in his legislation there is an entirely
new recognition of human equality, and a strong
purpose to protect the weak and oppressed. In the
long series of his legislative acts, he provided for
such things as the encouragement of the emancipa
tion of slaves, the abolition of the punishment of
crucifixion and of the branding of criminals on the
face, the discouragement of the exposure of infants,

* Stromateis III. 68, i, quoted by Glover, Conflict of Religions, p. 303.

122 The Ancient Church and Modern India

the prohibition of cruel and licentious rites, and the
prohibition of gladiatorial games — though such was
the popular passion for them that it could not be
made effective until about a century later, after the
monk Telemachus had sacrificed his life by a protest-
in the arena. He made laws prohibiting unjust
detention of prisoners, laws giving to mothers rights
of guardianship over their own children, laws against
immorality and easy divorce, and laws against oppres
sion by rich persons and tax gatherers. The world
cannot be altogether changed by improved laws, and
it is probable that a good deal of Constantine's new
regulations was impossible to enforce. But they
reveal a new conception of the purpose of govern
ment as being the defence of the weak and oppressed
and the promotion of public morality. Constantine
was followed by other Christian Emperors down to
the time of Theodosius I, under whom was made
between 429 and 438 a compilation of the laws of
Christian Emperors, only a few years before the fall
of the Empire. Their work shows a blending of
pagan and Christian influences, reflecting the mingled
public opinion of the time; but the respect for
womanhood, the considerateness towards the op
pressed, and the desire for equal justice between man
and man which characterize them are new and wholly
beneficent elements in Roman legislation. They
are surely an illustration of the kind of leavening
influence which the Christian religion brings into
the business of law-making in every country.

One aspect of the relation of Christianity to
political matters is of special interest in these days,

Social Effects of Christianity 123

when decisive steps are being taken towards the
ultimate establishment of popular forms of govern
ment in India. True democracy is the expression
in the political sphere of the principles of liberty,
equality, and fraternity for all men. Even a hasty
reading of the history of the beginnings of Chris
tianity is sufficient to show that the whole Church
was a brotherhood whose mutual love impressed
even the enemies of Christianity. The equality of
men in the sight of God was an inevitable conse
quence of belief in the divine Fatherhood, and
expressed itself, as we have already seen, in the
Church's attitude to social cleavages and towards the
poor and the slaves. As for liberty, although the
abstract conception of full liberty of conscience had
not yet dawned upon the generality of men, still the
whole Christian readiness to suffer persecution for
conscience sake was the most powerful defence of
the principle which could have been devised. For,
as a Christian apologist, Tertullian, wrote, " It is a
fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that
any and every man should worship what he thinks
right." In a time of political despotism, the Chris
tian religion was sowing broadcast the seeds of true
democracy. Democracy is only real in the degree
in which all members of a state genuinely believe
in freedom, equality, and brotherhood. Christianity
has flourished under every type of political govern
ment; but it has a very special function to fulfil in
any country which is preparing for democracy.

CHAPTER VIII.

DEBATED PRACTICAL QUESTIONS.

i. Names of Christians.

SHOULD a convert change his name at baptism ?
Ought a name to be in itself a proclamation of
the religion to which a man belongs? Is there any
danger lest a name which has non-Christian associa
tions should exert an indefinably non-Christian
influence? These are questions of great practical
importance, which have been much debated in India.
This is not the place for a discussion of the whole
problem; but this happens to be one of the subjects
upon which ancient Christian precedents have great
suggestiveness and may fitly here be cited.

(a) A mere glance at the names of the persons to
whom St. Paul is sending greetings in Rom. xvi. 3-16
makes it perfectly clear that at any rate the first
generation of Christians saw no need to change their
names, even when they involved the names of
heathen gods. The New Testament at large seems
to show that at first the Christians no more thought
it necessary to change their names than to change
their dress. We might have expected that even if
the first generation of Christians saw no need to
change their own names upon conversion, they
would have taken care to give Christian names
to their children. But the evidence of inscriptions

124

Debated Practical Questions 125

proves that they did nothing of the kind. Further,
if anyone could be expected to wear some exclusively
Christian title, it would be the bishop. But in the
first list of bishops which we happen to possess, that
of the North African synod in A.D. 256, out of
eighty-seven names, only two are Christian (Peter
and Paul); the rest are ordinary pagan names, many
of them actually those of pagan gods. This was
in the West; but all the evidence goes to show that
the same was true of the East. It is a striking fact
that " the martyrs perished because they declined to
sacrifice to the gods whose names they bore."

This can hardly have happened entirely without
reflection. In fact we have proof that in a few
exceptional cases Christians felt uneasy about their
pagan names. Five Egyptians martyred at Caesarea
in 310 gave to the magistrate not their own Egyptian
names, but the names of Old Testament prophets.
But the way Eusebius tells the story shows that this
was entirely an unusual case. No discussions of this
matter in the early centuries have been preserved to
us, but the practice of the whole Church is clear.
Even after the Christian religion had overcome the
Roman Empire, Christians continued to give their
children non-Christian names. Naturally in course
of time, at any rate by the beginning of the third
century, some parents began to like to call their
children after Peter and Paul; but very curiously
these seem for a long time to be the only New Testa
ment names given to Christians. Any other dis
tinctively Christian names which came into occa
sional use were taken from the Old Testament until

126 The Ancient Church and Modern India

well into the fourth century. When the practice of
taking the name of some great Christian saint did
ultimately, in the fourth century, spread in wider
circles, it seems to have been not entirely free from
the superstitious idea of thus securing help and
patronage from the saint whose name was adopted.
One writer in the fifth century definitely says that
such names put their bearers under the protection
of patron saints.* This was a characteristically
pagan idea, simply taken over into Christianity. We
thus reach the surprising conclusion that, as Harnack
says, " In the days when Christians bore pagan names
and nothing more, the dividing line between Chris
tianity and the world was drawn much more sharply
than in the days when they began to call themselves
Peter and Paul. As is so often the case, the forms
made their appearance just when the spirit was
undermined. "f

The choice, however, did not lie entirely between
the names of heathen gods and the names of saints.
There were names from geography and agriculture,
from jewels and colours, rivers and months, from
the wish for good luck, and so on. Naturally Chris
tians preferred some names to others, but none were
taboo. A sentence of Tertullian's suggests that the
only serious objection which could be felt against a
name was its ugliness, or ill-omened sound, or its
insulting or unseemly connotation. Any other sort
of name would serve for the Christian as well as for
the pagan, and there are many instances of Chris-

* Theodoret of Cyrrhus, de Grescarum Affectwvum Curationibus,
Sermo VIII. f Expansion of Christianity, Vol. II, p. 37.

Debated Practical Questions 127

tians bearing the names of pagan deities right down
to the sixth century.

All this seems to give clear guidance to Christians
in India. It has to be remembered that in these
days of national feeling there is a special objection
to names or forms which are unnecessarily foreign
to India. Church History plainly suggests that it
is unnecessary to Christian loyalty to wear a Bible
name. Christian loyalty is a spirit which can mani
fest itself in life much better than in a name. The
best Christians of the early centuries wore heathen
names without any undesirable consequences result
ing therefrom. At the same time, many of the
names of outcastes now being baptized are, in
Tertullian's language, " barbarous or ill-omened, or
containing some insult or impropriety." Such names
must be changed, but not into Bible names or names
of foreign missionaries, like Methuselah or Jones.
All the names of virtues, colours, jewels, numbers,
rivers, months, the geographical and agricultural
names which early Christians used in Greek or Latin
and which already exist in Sanskrit or vernacular,
are available, and for the sake of the naturalizing of
Christianity in India should be suggested to the con
vert whose old name was objectionable. For the
rest no change at all is necessary.

2. Mixed Marriages.

There are not a few indications that in the early
Christian community the women outnumbered the
men, especially in the upper ranks of society, and
that this gave rise to serious practical difficulties,

128 The Ancient Church and Modern India

especially in the resultant tendency of Christian
women to marry pagans. In the very first days we
find St. Paul advising; husbands and wives married

to unbelievers not to leave their partners (i Cor.
vii. 12-14). But to anyone who contemplated
marriage with a non-Christian he said sharply, " Be
not unequally yoked with unbelievers " (2 Cor. vi.
14). For a century and a half after St. Paul we hear
nothing of such marriages, and it is probable that
they did not occur. But by the end of the second
century it appears that they had become fairly com
mon. Tertullian wrote a whole book exhorting his
wife not to marry a pagan in case he died, and
expressly said that such marriages were taking place.
His discussion of the subject throws much light
upon the ordinary life of a Christian woman in
Carthage, and upon the habits and customs of the
average pagan husband, thereby bringing home to
the mind the continual vexation of soul which must
have been the portion of any Christian woman
married to a pagan, and which in some cases must
have amounted to continual martyrdom. We see
the Christian woman anxious to keep a fast, and
compelled that day to partake of a convivial feast,
in an atmosphere of idolatry. She wishes to visit
poorer brethren, to attend the Lord's Supper (which
pagans believe licentious), to attend occasional night
meetings, on Easter Eve to be all night long away
from home. How can the pagan husband prevent
himself from feeling suspicious of such practices?
She sometimes does things even more open to
suspicion, creeping into prison to kiss a martyr's

Debated Practical Questions 129

bonds, even exchanging the " kiss of peace " with
Christian brethren. She is noticed saving up some
of her own food to give to her fellow-believers. She
makes the sign of the cross over her bed or her body,
or even by night rises to pray. Before she takes
any food she secretly tastes holy bread she has
reserved from the sacrament (according to local usage
at the time). These things must look to the husband
like dangerous magic. She has to do her Christian
duties under a watchful and unsympathetic eye, often
by her very zeal adding to the circumstantial evidence
which seems so strong against her.*

That such a marriage involved much suffering and
temptation was clear to all. What was not so clear
was whether it was an offence against religion, to
be visited with the severest discipline of the Church.
Tertullian felt no doubt whatever that such a union
was to be treated as on a par with fornication, to be
punished by excommunication from the Christian
brotherhood. He was deeply pained that some
Christian brother had said that marriage with a pagan
was only a trivial offence, f

Bishop Cyprian of Carthage took up entirely the
same attitude, and ruled that no marriage tie was
to be formed with pagans. Later on the Council
of Elvira in Spain in 305 passed noteworthy rules.
" Because Christian maidens are very numerous, they
are by no means to be married off to pagans, lest
their youthful prime presume and relax into an
adultery of the soul." " Neither Jews nor heretics

* See Tertullian, To Us Wife, Book IT ch 4-6.
t To his Wife, Book II, ch. 3.

130 The Ancient Church and Modern India

are to be allowed to marry Catholic girls, since there
can be no fellowship between a believer and an unbe
liever. Any parents who disobey this interdict shall
be excluded from the Church for five years."
" Should any parents have married their daughters
to heathen priests., it is resolved that they shall never
be granted communion." Yet so severe a view was
not held in all places alike, for at the later Synod
of Aries in Gaul it is only laid down that Christian
maidens who have married pagans " shall be excluded
from communion for a certain period."

Consequently in this problem, which in some parts
of India, but especially in North Ceylon, is causing
much perplexity, the history of the Church does not
give such clear guidance as in the matter of Christian
names. Yet it clearly pronounces that in some way
or other parents responsible for bringing about mixed
marriages should be disciplined by the Church. The
severity of the discipline to be inflicted must be
estimated by the educated Christian conscience of
the Church to-day, but certainly the practice itself
needs to be very strongly opposed. A marriage
union in spirit as well as in body is impossible where
husband and wife are separated by fundamental
views of life, and any other union is alike a degrada
tion of marriage and a fruitful source of unhappi-
ness. All the spiritual resources of the Church
should be used to prevent it.

3, Church Buildings.

For a very long time the Christian Church had no
public buildings for its worship. Doubtless in some

Debated Practical Questions 131

areas earlier than in others it was felt to be necessary
to erect special buildings for worship only; but the
statement is broadly true that for the first hundred
and fifty years of its existence, that is to say through
out the first great period of expansion, the Christian
Church managed without special buildings for its
purposes. The fact is surely worth pondering.
When we consider how high a percentage of the
total work and giving of most of our modern
Churches is devoted to the erection and maintenance
of special ecclesiastical buildings, we can hardly help
wondering if there has come about a change in our
conception of the relative urgency of the needs which
a Church ought to attempt to supply.

In the normal Church of the fourth century the
bishop's chair was placed behind the Lord's Table
at the end of the Church, with benches on each side
for the presbyters. The communicant members of
the Church were in the middle part of the building,
or nave, the sexes separate. Further back was the
narthex, a kind of vestibule, occupied by the
catechumens, the penitents under discipline, and any
unbelievers who chose to attend. All these occu
pants of the narthex had to withdraw before the
communion service was celebrated. The building
was in shape not unlike the Roman basilica, or hall
of justice and business in large cities.

The scanty information available concerning the
buildings of the early Church suggests to us, on the
one hand, that a special building is not essential to
a Church, and should not be regarded as the indis
pensable focus of all its activities; on the other, that

132 The Ancient Church and Modern India

there is no one authoritative form which Church
buildings must adopt. The Church in India is
under no obligation to imitate the style of architec
ture developed under totally different conditions in
Europe. The Christians of India have yet to dis
cover the form of building in which they can best
worship God, and there is both room and need for
experimentation. Some will want four simple walls,
sufficient roof to give protection from sun and rain,
but only the dome of sky overhead as the finest
symbol of God's presence. Others will wish to
hallow with all the associations of a shrine that por
tion of their building where sacred symbols stand and
the Communion service takes place. Some will find
a place for Christian gopuras, while others will build
prayer-halls with Moorish arches, where a Moham
medan can feel at home. Some will erect a building
whose whole form is shaped by the conception of
the Eucharist as the focus of the Church's life, while
others will build with the supreme purpose of the
proclamation of the word of the Gospel. Let them
but think out their needs, free from the necessity of
imitation of the models of other countries, and then
build simply and sincerely; and the day will come
when Christian buildings in India will play as great
a part in the interpretation of religion as was played
by the cathedrals of Europe in the Middle Ages.

4. The importance of terms.

It is often assumed that names are of so little
importance that it matters little if Christianity in
India borrows extensively from the religious terms

Debated Practical Questions 133

which have been in use among Hindus for many
centuries. As a mere necessity of translation it is
evident that terms have to be borrowed, but the
history of the early Church suggests that they must
be chosen with extreme care and their connotation
carefully guarded; else they are liable to carry with
them an atmosphere quite foreign to that which they
are intended to convey. There are cases in which
the average man's conception of the meaning of a
religious act has been profoundly affected by the
name which has been casually associated with that
act in the public mind.

One conspicuous case is that of the Eucharist
itself. From early days, when the Eucharist and
the love-feast were connected, it was the custom of
the Christians to bring offerings in kind, especially
bread and wine, for the love-feast. It was not
unnatural that the same Greek term should be used
for these gifts as was used to denote temple offer
ings, especially as it signified merely " things brought
forward or presented." The term was felt to be
specially appropriate in the case of that part of the
offerings which was actually used for the celebration
of the Eucharist. Hence it came about that at least
as early as Irenaeus, i.e. about A.D. 175, we find the
bread and wine of the Lord's Supper conceived as
first- fruit offerings from God's created gifts, pre
sented in prayer, as the Christian thank-offering
(Eucharistia) in contrast with Gentile sacrifices.
Apparently no one noticed any real change when
the Church's "gifts" to God's service (i Clem.
x^v- 3)> to be used in commemoration of Christ's

134 The Ancient Church and Modern India

self-oblation and for brotherly communion, came to
be spoken of as sacrificial oblations (prosphora).
Ultimately, however, the term came by association
to be applied to the elements (after consecration)
with the idea that somehow or other Christ Himself,
sacrificially offered for us, was in the prosphora, the
" offerings " of self-oblation which men offered at
and in the Eucharist. And in the long run that
meaning eclipsed all others in the Catholic Church,
though it has no warrant in strictly primitive Chris
tian usage (e.g. Rom. xii. i; i Pet. ii. 5; Heb. xiii.
I5f.; cfrPhil. iv. 1 8).

Less conspicuous is the case of the terms borrowed
from the Greek mysteries to denote matters con
nected with Christian worship, such as " seal " or
" mystery " for baptism, the description of the
baptized as " initiates," as well as various Levitical
and hierarchical terms used of the Church's ministry.
In the pseudo-Dionysius (about A.D. 500) every
Christian ordinance is described in terms strictly
applicable only to the Greek mysteries. This is not
the place for a discussion of the extent to which the
Christian worship was affected by contact with the
Greek mysteries. But it is certain that, about the
same time as these terms became popularized among
Christians, there grew up among them a fashion of
secrecy about the special sacred forms and formulas
of Christian faith and worship, which was referred
to as the " discipline of secrecy," and which had an
unfortunate influence upon the conception of Chris
tianity among those who were outside, if not among
Christians themselves. There is little evidence for

Debated Practical Questions 135

anything of this kind before the end of the second
century, and it is fairly clear that it slipped into the
Christian Church on the analogy of pagan "mystery"
usage.

A similar thing might easily happen in India, if
no one were on the watch against it, since the
tendency to form esoteric circles of initiates has
always been strong in Hindu sects. Any mainten
ance of secrecy is opposed to the whole spirit of
Christianity, as of Judaism before it.

But perhaps the most serious example of change
is one where the same term gradually changed
its meaning, namely the term " faith." It is not
open to question that in the first days of the Church
" faith " meant personal trust in Jesus Christ, a vital
and experimental surrender of the self in loyalty
to and reliance upon the Lord. But by the fourth
century the word had come to denote acceptance of
a number of credal statements, in some of which
there was as much Greek philosophy as there was
personal religion. Those credal statements were
noble and necessary efforts to state Christian truth
to the fourth century; and in making them it was
no more possible for the Church to eliminate Greek
philosophical thought than it would be for us to
state Christian truth to our own generation while
eliminating modern secular knowledge. But
acquiescence in those statements was a different thing
from the personal entrusting of the self to a divine
Lord, and could even exist without it. And since
faith is central to and determinative of the whole
Christian religion, it meant that something not dis-

136 The Ancient Church and Modern India

tinctively Christian had obtained a controlling
influence over the religion, because the Church as a
whole failed to notice that the meaning of a term had
changed.

The Church in India has chosen various vernacular
terms to translate " faith " (Greek, pistis), and is
gradually imparting to them her own special atmo
sphere and connotation. But the history of the past
suggests that there is no term which needs to be
more carefully guarded than this against a change
in significance which would slowly alter the whole
character of the religion.

5. Naturalizing Christianity In India.

It was said in the Preface that the religion
of Christ is a seed, cast into the soil of the world.
Both soil and seed help to determine the form of the
life of any plant; and this is equally true of religion.
Without changing its essential life or breaking its
continuity with the Church of all lands and all ages,
Indian Christianity will find new expressions of the
life in Christ. That it should do so is almost the
supreme need of the present hour. The worst
criticism which can be levelled against the Church
in India to-day is that its movements of life are so
seldom spontaneous, and so often galvanized from
without, with the result that the forms which they
create have an inevitably foreign appearance. Large
numbers of Indian people are refusing to give any
serious examination to the claims of Christ because
they are repelled at the outset by this unnecessary
foreignness in the outward appearance of the Chris
tian religion.

Debated Practical Questions 137

What is the remedy? Most certainly not any
attempt to modify Christianity with a view to making
it more popular. That would be an unfaithfulness
whose results would be fatal.

Nor is it likely that much success will attend the
efforts of any but Indian Christians themselves at
what may be called the Indianization of Christianity,
though foreign missionaries can give useful help by
refusing to impose on India the whole paraphernalia
of their Western Church organization, and by secur7
ing a clear course for Indian Christians who wish to
try their own methods. There is no quick remedy,
but only the way of growth. We are still at the
seed-sowing stage, and the main business is the sow
ing of good seed. We said above that the finding of
Indian expressions for the life in Christ is almost
the supreme need of the hour. Almost, but not
quite. The supreme need is still the faithful por
trayal of Christ Himself, and the communication of
the spirit which He imparts. Our main business,
then, is the proclamation of the good news of Christ,
evidenced by the power of a life which is obviously
inspired by Him. The magnetism of that gospel
and that life must ultimately draw the men of India
with such power and in such numbers as to create
an atmosphere which is as Indian as it is truly Chris
tian, and in which indigenous manifestations of
religious vitality will spontaneously arise. Then
will come the testing time, which will show whether
we care more for life or for familiar forms, and
whether we truly hold that the living Spirit of
Christ guides every race of believers into truth.

138 The Ancient Church and Modern India

Until then the business of every Christian who loves
India is to look to Christ for Himself, and so to
exalt Him by the testimony of life and lip that
throughout all the future, whatever changes may
come in the days which lie hidden with God, Christ
and He alone will be the living centre of the religion
of those who name His name in India. In Him
alone will they truly find God; by His sole grace
will they receive real salvation.

INDEX

Ahmadiyas, 33.
Amida, Bishop of, no.
Apologists, 50.
Aries, Synod of, 130.
Asceticism, 9, 39, 77, 103.
Athanasius, 81.

Basilides, 80.
Blandina, 77.
Buddhism, 41, 96.

Caste, 28, 82, 114.
Church worship, 15.

,, unity, 1 8.

„ organization, 21, 26.

,, buildings, 130.
Clement of Alexandria, 68, 94 ff,

108, 120,

Clement of Rome, 87.
Colosseum, 77.
Constantine, 121.
Cybele, 8.
Cyprian, 129.

Decius, 78, 105.
Democracy, 122.
Diocletian, 81.
Diognetus, Ep. to, 51, 92.
Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria,

Eclecticism, 32.
Economic conditions, 23, no.
Education of women, 117, 119.
Equality of all men, 123.
Esoteric tendencies, 41, 134.
Eucharist, 19, 133.

Faith, 135.
Felicitas, 80.

Greek language, 3.
„ religion, 5.
„ philosophy, 7, 37.

Harnack, 126.

Hinduism, 5, 41, 57, 63, 70, 117.

Horus, 9.

Idolatry, 61, 64.
Ignatius, 76.
Irenaeus, 41.
Isamoshipanthis, 33.
Isis, 8, 9.

Jews, 10, 44.
Justin, 45, 51, 52, 54.

Knowledge, Greek exaltation of,

34-
,, Salvation by, 41, 42,

94-
Krishnan Pillay, 86.

Lactantius, 114.
Lares, 6.
Lucian, 79.

Marcus Aurelius, 78.

Mass- movements, 56, 59, 63.

Matter regarded as evil, 35, 40,

42, 63.

Milan, Edict of, 81, 121.
Mohammedanism, 12, 45, 49.
Mysteries, Greek, 134.

Nationality, 22, 71, 136.

139

140 Index

Ophites, 36.
Origen, 57 ff, 103 ff.
Orpheus, 69.

Pantaenus, 96.

Perpetua, 80.

Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, 74.

Potamiaena, 80.

Property, conception of , 107, in

Radha Soamis, 33.
Roman Empire, 1-3.
Rome, Church in, 88, 109.

Saivites, Tamil, 86.
Scili, Martyrs from, 99.
Snake worhsip, 6, 36.
Sorabji, Mrs. Cornelia, 117.

Telemachus, 122.

Tertullian, 68, 98 ff, 123, 129.

Theodosius, 122.

Theosophy, 32, 38, 41.

Tilak, N. V., 86.

Toleration, Edict of, at Milan,

81, 121.

Tongues, speaking with, 15.
Trypho, Dialogue with, 45.

Vaishnavites, Maratha, 86.
Word, doctrine of the, 50, 52.

NEW TESTAMENT REFS.

Matthew xix. 12 ... ... 104

,, xxiii. 8 ... ... 26

,, xxiii. 15 ... ... ii

Markx. 42 26

Luke ii. i ... ... ... I

„ iv. 31 39

John i. 9 68

Acts xiv. ii 4

,, xv. ii 29

Romans xii. i 134

,, xvi. 3-16 ... 124

xvi. 7 25

I Corinthians iv. 15 ... 25

vi. ii ... 67

vii. 12-14 ... 128

xi. 16 ... 26

xiv. 20 ... 26

xv. 14 ... 26

II Corinthians vi. 14 ... 128
Galatians iii. 28 ... ... 30

v. i 26

Ephesians ii. 14 ... ... 30

,, iii.-iv. ... ... 19

Philippians iv. 18 134

Colossians ... ... ... 34

Timothy, Epp. to 34

I Peter ii. 5 134

II Peter i. 5 34

James ... ... ... 108

I John ii. 4 ... ... ... 34

Jude 34

Apocalypse 34

GARDEN CITY PRESS, PRINTERS, LETCinVORTII, ENGLAND.

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